


Assembly Required

by ehefic



Category: Glee
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-30
Updated: 2012-06-05
Packaged: 2017-11-07 05:11:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 24,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/427226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ehefic/pseuds/ehefic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Brittana as Avengers: Just when Santana's about to swoon against the wall from the look of those eyes, Brittany Pierce, the Iron Maiden, actually winks at her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Santana & Snix

What began as an irradiation hypothesis and a way to reconnect with the world has become a disenchanted struggle to the end of her three-month research commitment. By the time Santana follows an urchin to a hut on the outskirts of town, she's seen so much vomit and diarrhea that she's honestly a little relieved to find ominous emptiness instead of more malaria victims.

She's also ready to trade what's left of her incredibly expensive experimental gamma prophylactics in exchange for a proper hot shower.

The urchin slips out a window in the back of the hut and Santana freezes. The silence puts Santana on edge.

(In her gut, she can feel  _the other girl_  stirring anxiously—angry-anxious, the way she gets.)

Santana grits her teeth and snaps, "Who's there?"

"Just me," says a voice just behind her. Santana whirls on a blond woman with one eyebrow raised and a ridiculous skintight black getup.

"Who's me?" growls Santana, one hand gripping her bag behind her hip and the other splayed lightly across a tabletop.

The stranger offers a quietly menacing smile and steps closer. The other girl turns Santana's stomach, aching to escape her cage; Santana sighs into it.

"Black Widow," says the blonde, apparently as an answer.

Santana sneers over her nervousness. "I said I was done with that shit," she says, digging her nails into the grain of the wooden table.

"What shit?" asks Black Widow in the voice of a condescending kindergarten teacher.

"Capes shit. You won't get her out of me."

Black Widow looks at Santana like she's a puzzle with a prize inside. Santana cloaks her rage in annoyance and ignores the way Snix rumbles in her bones.

"Who says I want her out of you?" asks Black Widow.

"They always want her," Santana scoffs, caught a little off guard. SHIELD doesn't usually play coy when they want Snix to fuck shit up, and it seems a strange time to start.

Black Widow reaches the table, and Santana looks her up and down uneasily. "What about you?" asks Black Widow, wrapping her fingers around the back of the chair while Santana decides she probably couldn't take her without letting Snix out.

"What about me?"

Black Widow shrugs. "Holliday called me and told me they need you to track something with gamma rays."

Santana stares at her in naked astonishment. "Holliday wants me—for gamma rays?"

Black Widow looks Santana up and down, so steadily it makes Santana's skin crawl. "What else would she want you for?"

"Don't play dumb." Santana scowls and straightens up, touching the strap of her bag where it crosses her chest. "It's unattractive. You know who I am, and so do I."

"No, I don't," says Black Widow, and she sounds so disappointed it catches Santana off-guard again. "It'd sure be interesting to find out."

Santana snaps. "No, it wouldn't!" she thunders, twisting and pounding the table with two fists. She glares Black Widow hard in her startled eyes before glancing at the barrel of the gun pointing at her face. Black Widow must have stashed it, under the table or in that skintight suit of hers.

Black Widow waits, frozen and tense; she's clearly sure Santana's going to transform any second. Santana stands back and uncurls her fingers in surrender. "Hey, easy," she soothes, sliding her eyes back to Black Widow's pretty face. "I just wanted to see what you'd do."

Black Widow's hands shake, almost imperceptibly. She looks unconvinced.

"Let's do this the easy way," Santana suggests with a small smile. "Where you don't have to use that"—she gestures at the gun—"and the other girl doesn't make a mess."

Finally, after an unbearably tense pause, Black Widow lowers her gun and touches her ear. "Stand down," she says; outside, Santana can hear a dozen firearm safeties clicking on.

Santana smirks and cracks the knuckle of her thumb against the tabletop to keep herself focused. "Just you, huh?" she chuckles, mirthless and tired. She wonders if SHIELD dropped a glass containment sphere over the building while they were talking.

Black Widow smiles without guilt or regret. She holsters her weapon and says, "Either way, Holliday said they lost something that leaves a gamma trail, or something, and that you're the go-to gamma girl. So are you on board, or what?"

Santana stares at her and tries to ignore the sting of hope at the thought of SHIELD wanting to use her for her proper use. After a long pause, Santana wets her lips and mutters, "Fine. This radiation-malaria research isn't going anywhere, anyway."

"Good." Black Widow smiles like a Cheshire cat and watches Santana fidget. After a beat, she narrows her eyes at Santana, almost amused. "How  _do_ you keep control of it? Yoga? Prozac?"

Santana stares at her suspiciously. "Fuck you."

Black Widow laughs. "You wish," she says, brushing past the table and Santana and heading for the doorway. She pauses, raises her eyebrow again, and gestures for Santana to follow her outside—like she's surprised it wasn't obvious.

"Now?" asks Santana, thinking of her duffel bag at the clinic and her contact lens case left in the ratty room she's staying in. She automatically touches the glasses tucked around the first button of her shirt.

Black Widow nods. Halfway to the subtle giant black SUV, she turns to Santana and says, "I'm Quinn."

"Fuck you," says Santana.

* * *

"Dr. Lopez!" calls Quinn from behind. Santana spins, feeling childlike and out-of-place amid what seems to be an outsize, aquatic air force base.

"Quinn," says Santana, holding her bag and glasses against the gusts of wind rolling off the planes. Quinn's standing beside Finn Hudson, the famous iceman.

When they reach Santana, Finn pulls a hand from the pocket of his distressed leather jacket and offers it to her with a grin. He's both taller and dopier in person than he is on television, and she takes his hand and gives it a single distrustful pump. "Mr. Hudson," she greets.

"Ma'am," he says with his kick-me grin. He shoves his hand back in his pocket and squints to look around the ship. "Word is you're cube-finding gal."

With narrowed eyes, Santana baits, "Is that the only word on me?"

Finn puffs up. "Only word I care about," he assures with a cocksure wink.

Santana eyes him and glances at Quinn. "This must be strange for you," she tries, looking at Finn again.

"Actually, this is pretty familiar," he says, shooting a wistful look of angst at a pack of soldiers jogging laps around the airfield.

Just as Santana clears her throat to try to kill his weird private moment, Quinn breaks the silence for her cleanly. "You may want to step inside, new blood."

Her words are punctuated by near-deafening mechanical noises. Santana scampers to the edge and looks down; Finn follows her, asking, "Is this a submarine?"

Santana snorts, watching the water churn mysteriously, and mutters, "They really want me in a submerged, pressurized container?"

"Not a submarine," says Quinn behind them.

The turbines emerge, triumphant, from the spray, already whirring ominously. Santana's stomach drops and her lips twist in a grim smile. "Oh, no," she mutters, "this is much worse."

* * *

The deck of the helicarrier would be more arresting if Santana hadn't worked with SHIELD before. As it is, she shuffles around the perimeter of the bridge, startling to a stop when she nearly bumps into two SWAT-outfitted agents flanking a closed door. She bites her lips, feeling that nervous, irrational guilt she gets when she forgets to take her belt off before passing through a metal detector: like she's impersonated a dangerous criminal and wasted the guards' time.

(Snix churns in her belly, as if to sneer at Santana's timidity.)

She wraps her arms around her stomach and hunches her shoulders against the agents' uninterested eyes.

Ahead, Holliday's already set up at her podium, directing the smartly dressed attendants with her characteristically casual country lilt. Santana's fingers loosen where they grip her shirt; she didn't realize she missed Holly until now.

(Again, she feels the other girl pace inside her, like a tiger trapped.)

She feels embarrassed, caught, even if Snix is the only one who's noticed. She clutches her sides tighter to distract herself.

Once Holliday instructs the monitor jockeys to activate the cloaking panels, she twirls on her heels and beams at Santana, Finn, and Quinn. "Hey, dudes," she greets, clasping her hands together.

Finn sidles up to a SHIELD agent with curly brown hair and slips him a $10 bill. Santana keeps her arms folded and her eyes on Holliday, who sidles straight up to her with that honey-sweet smile.

"Thank you for coming, Dr. Lopez," Holliday purrs, offering her hand to shake.

Santana tugs her hand from where it's wedged under her armpit and shakes Holliday's, swallowing her blush and her nerves. "Thanks for asking nicely."

"Sure thing, sweet cheeks," says Holliday.

When Holliday stays quiet, just stares and smiles, Santana clears her throat and says, "I hear you need me for gamma rays. After that, I get to leave?"

Holliday shrugs and sashays back toward her array of monitors. "As soon as you find the Tesseract, you're off the hook."

Santana glances at Quinn, but Quinn's busy peering at a tech's computer screen. "Is that the gamma rays thing you put in the teaser trailer?"

"It gives off small traces of gamma radiation," Holliday explains. She raises an eyebrow and flashes that smug little smile of hers. "That's where you come in."

" _That's_ where I come in?" asks Santana doubtfully, glancing at the others and folding her arms again. When Holliday just keeps smiling at her—almost curiously, like she's going to make Santana say it, like SHIELD has ever wanted her for anything besides Snix—Santana coughs delicately and scuffs her toe against the floor. "Where are you guys on finding the casserole, or whatever?"

"We have every camera on the planet looking for Blaine or the Tesseract," the curly-haired agent cuts in, "but we haven't come up with anything."

Quinn snorts. "Yeah, 'cause I really want to bet the fate of the planet against the odds someone texts a picture of the pretty glowing Rubik's cube. That won't be fast enough."

Curly-hair glares at her, so Santana cuts in before the tension can boil over. "You just need to narrow the field. I can draw up some quick guidelines for research labs to use to scan for the gamma rays, if you can get the researchers on the phone."

"Done," says Holliday, almost happily.

"Then I'll put together a tracking algorithm. We can narrow it down for your satellite search." Santana unknots her arms and delicately opens her glasses. "Do you have somewhere for me to work?"

Holliday snorts. "Duh! You know I hooked you up. Agent Fabray, would you show Dr. Lopez to her lab, por favor?" She shoots a wink at Santana; Santana ducks her head, feeling heat rise in her cheeks, and follows Quinn off the bridge.

"You're gonna love it," Quinn confides with a small smile. "We got all the toys."

* * *

A herd of SHIELD agents in full gear make a point to perp-walk Blaine past Santana's lab. She's spent all afternoon and evening looking up every time someone passes, and she does a double-take and pulls her glasses off when she recognizes the beetle helmet and bowtie.

It's only then, when Blaine's giving her a slimy smirk after what must have been quite a fight, that Santana realizes she—well, the other girl—wasn't called in for field duty.

Still. The confidence in Blaine's expression—and the way he makes steady, happy eye contact with her—robs her of her relief.

* * *

Not long after, Holliday summons them all back to the bridge—Santana as well as the field team that captured Blaine and apparently includes the renowned Brittany Pierce, cheekily dubbed Iron Maiden, among their number.

Santana hangs back by the door, rolling her shirtsleeves up uneasily and eyeing the cluster of fellow freaks lounging around the table. There's a new addition sitting near her—tall and blonde, even—but it's not the one Santana is actually interested in meeting. This one's name is Sam, and he's supposedly connected to the pain in the ass currently inhabiting the giant glass cage meant for Santana.

The memory stings. She pushes her glasses up her nose, folds her arms, and watches the door with nervous impatience. Holliday isn't here yet, either.

The curly-haired agent, whom others have addressed as Agent Schuester, activates a set of television panels in the center table for them to watch. The screens show Blaine in the fishbowl, wearing the same shit-eating grin he flashed Santana as he passed the laboratory.

Santana looks up when her ears start burning and she catches Quinn looking at her from the table. Santana touches her glasses where they balance on her nose and hangs back from the table and the monitors.

Blaine's not stupid. He teases Holliday, asking if she thinks human containers can hold him.

For her part, Holliday sounds amused—though Santana can't see the screens to check her expression—when she counters, "It can hold a hell of a lot more than you, bugaboo."

"Of course," drawls Blaine cheerfully. "The monster woman, more monster than woman."

Quinn glances at Santana again. Quinn's needling looks are bothering Santana far more than Blaine's petty jabs do. It's beginning to feel like Quinn doesn't think Santana can handle the reminder; as if Santana doesn't live with the  _reminder_ stomping and frothing inside her every second of every day.

Blaine baits Holliday, calling her powerless and overwhelmed. Holliday bites back, clever and charming as always, that if he wants  _Star_ magazine, all he has to do is ask.

Still, the guy's hardly a winner. Santana bites her thumbnail just as the feed cuts out. "He sure grows on you," she mutters drily.

No one else is making noise, so everyone hears. Finn fixes it by ignoring her comment entirely. "Blaine's gonna drag this out." He looks pointedly at Sam, who stares thoughtfully into space. "Sam, you're our in, here. What's he gonna do? What's his play?"

Without looking up, Sam says, "He has an army called the Warblers. They're unlike anything you've faced before, and he means to use them to conquer this planet." Sam shakes his head. "They will install him as king and conqueror. I suspect the Tesseract will be their payment."

Finn stares blankly, probably hoping to look unimpressed. "Aliens." He glances at Quinn, then Santana, as if for backup. "From outer space."

Making a point to ignore his whining, which doesn't change the challenge ahead of them, Santana takes her glasses off thoughtfully. "He's going to open another portal first, with the Tesseract. That's why he grabbed Dr. Selvig."

"Selvig?" asks Sam, looking at Santana in alarm.

She hesitates. "He's an astrophysicist," she explains timidly, fiddling with the stalks of her glasses.

Sam's face is hard, though his eyes stay soft. "He's a friend."

"Blaine has him under some kind of hypnosis mojo," Quinn cuts in. She adds sadly, "Along with one of our own."

Before Santana can ask who it is or why Quinn cares so visibly, Finn steamrolls the conversation again. "I'd like to know why Blaine came so quietly. He was damn near whistling when we walked him in here, but he can't command an army from a cell."

Santana bristles.

(Snix rumbles.)

"Why are you basing everything on Blaine? He's about as stable and mentally balanced as that eighty-year-old animal hoarder that kept pigeons and wild field mice as matched pairs in a life-size replica of Noah's ark. His brain is a bag full of cats. I can smell his crazy from here."

"Watch it," warns Sam, standing and bracing one arm on the table. His muscles ripple ominously and Santana bites her lip. "Blaine may be skirting the reaches of his sanity, but he is of Asgard, and he is my brother."

Santana demurs instantly, clutching her glasses and worrying she's stepped on too many toes already.

(She feels Snix seething, at her and at everything else.)

Quinn raises an eyebrow, half threat and half morbid amusement. "He killed eighty people in two days," she reminds Sam mildly.

Now it's Sam biting his lip. "He's adopted," he amends.

Santana clears her throat and voices her thoughts—gently. "You said he was in Germany for iridium. What does he need iridium for?"

"A stabilizing agent."

The far doors open and reveal Brittany Pierce, resplendent and angelic, in plain jeans and a dark Iron Maiden shirt. Her gold hair and light eyes seem brighter in comparison, glowing like the disc visible through the fabric at her breastbone. Santana stares openly, vaguely aware her mouth is hanging open, as Brittany—the living masterpiece—sweeps gracefully across the floor.

"He needs the iridium so the Tesseract won't collapse in on itself, like when it made that mess at SHIELD." She flashes a secretive half-smile as she passes Sam, who still stands poised to make fervent gestures in not-quite-defense of Blaine. She taps his corded bicep with the back of her hand and quips, good-naturedly, "No hard feelings, trouty mouth. You got a mean swing."

Santana realizes she's been ogling, blatantly and obviously, for a full thirty seconds. She can feel Quinn's gaze, annoyed or curious or teasing or all three. Santana can't tear her eyes away from what must be a reincarnation of Helen of Troy.

"A stable portal can also open wider and stay open longer," Brittany continues, stepping up to an empty chair at the table and propping her hands on her hips.

"Perfect if you've got a big, ugly alien army you need to move," Finn sighs. He leans on his fist and begins to speak, but Quinn cuts him off.

"He has the iridium. Anything else he needs that can buy us time?" Quinn's expression hardens, and she seems to be sizing Brittany up. Then, Quinn cuts her eyes over to Santana; she raises an eyebrow, as if accusing Santana of being out-scienced.

Santana clutches her glasses in both hands, caught off-guard by Quinn's intense glare, but Brittany beats her to the punch for what already feels like the millionth time. "Your defector—Chang, was it?—can get his hands on the other raw materials pretty easily." Her voice sounds casual, but Santana senses teasing behind Chang's name.

Brittany tugs her lips downward and shrugs nonchalantly. "All he needs now is a little kick to kick-start the cube, and then he's good to go and we're gone."

"You seem awfully happy about it," Finn mutters.

Schuester frowns and asks, "Since when are you an expert in thermonuclear physics?"

Amused rather than offended, Brittany tips her head to one side and folds her arms. "Last night. When I read Dr. Selvig's notes."

Blank stares greet her from the table. Santana bites her lips and takes a shy step back to lean against the wall. Her mounting efforts to tear her eyes off of the hottest human alive are still coming up short.

Brittany drops her arms and raises her eyebrows, clearly unimpressed by her teammates. "The extraction theory papers?" she fishes, holding her hands up. "Am I seriously the only one who did the homework?"

Still biting her lips, Santana thumbs the rim of her glasses lens and tries to string a sentence together that won't group her with the rest of the unprepared morons at the table.

"What kind of power source does he need?" asks Finn, shifting in his seat and clearly annoyed at the accusation. "Will anything do? Like a flare, or—"

"He needs to heat it up," Santana blurts, less artfully than she'd like. "He'd need to get it to at least—no, a lot more than 100 million Kelvin, just to break through the Coulomb barrier."

"Unless"—Brittany holds up a finger, her eyes twinkling when they meet Santana's—"Selvig's figured out how to stabilize the quantum tunnel effect."

Just when Santana's about to swoon against the wall from the look of those eyes, Brittany Pierce, the Iron Maiden, actually winks at her.

What is it with hot blondes winking at her today?

Santana's hands are starting to feel clammy and damp against her glasses. "Well," she stammers, "if he could do that, he could achieve heavy ion fusion in any reactor he can get his hands on."

Brittany takes a step toward Santana, smooth and slick as a fox. Her catwalk belies the bright smile on her face; Santana feels silly for blushing when Brittany teases, "Finally, someone on this boat speaks English."

Trouble. Big trouble. Santana braces her hand flat against the wall behind her, to make sure it's still there.

"English? That's what that was?" gripes Finn, tugging at his star-spangled outfit.

"It's good to meet you, Dr. Lopez," says Brittany, taking Santana's hand and shaking it. Santana's palm is so sweaty from nerves that it almost slips from between those long fingers.

Santana opens her mouth to speak and finds herself voiceless. Her blush is creeping all the way to her ears and collarbone; Brittany makes it worse when she offers a coy smile and lets her touch linger against Santana's wrist. "Your work on anti-electron collisions is unparalleled," she purrs, as if she's saying something completely different.

Santana imitates a gasping fish for another millisecond before Brittany adds, eyes glittering again, "I'm also a big fan of the way you lose control and turn into an enormous green rage monster."

"I'm not sure you should be," Santana manages, wiping her hand on her slacks as soon as Brittany lets go.

Just when she's finally got her voice again, Holliday strides onto the bridge and warns, "Dr. Lopez is only here to track the Tesseract. Nothing more."

It's strangely reassuring to keep hearing it; Santana's shoulders relax automatically, and she tucks her glasses back into the open collar of her shirt.

"I was hoping you'd be able to pitch in," Holliday coaxes, raising her eyebrows at Brittany with a smile.

"Start with the stick," Finn instructs. He touches his stomach with the ghost of a grimace and says, "It doesn't look like much, but it packs a punch."

Brittany turns and looks about ready to tell Finn to stuff it when Holliday nods. "Sounds like a good idea. It sure looks matchy-matchy with the cube. I'd also love to know how it turned a bunch of my expensive, remarkably well-trained operatives into a gaggle of flying monkeys." Holliday frowns. "Or is it a pack?"

"A pack, I think," Brittany pitches in.

"Monkeys?" grunts Sam. "I do not—"

"I do!" Finn perks up at his new inclusion in the conversation. He glances at Quinn's unimpressed expression and deflates slightly. " _Wizard of Oz_. I understood that reference."

Beside Santana, Brittany sighs quietly and rolls her eyes. She aims her eyes in front of her, an impatient, blank look on her face; when no one speaks, she turns to Santana and inclines her head. "Shall we play, Doctor?"

Santana smiles and nods.

"After you," says Brittany, gesturing grandly toward the hallway.

"Thank you, Ms. Pierce," Santana says timidly, slipping by her.

"Call me Brittany," Brittany says, cheerful and sultry all at once.

Santana looks straight ahead and tucks a stray hair behind her ear. "Okay," she whispers to the corridor ahead of her.

* * *

Brittany unpacks three stainless steel briefcases full of equipment and research tech. Santana only notices she's staring, bug-eyed, when Brittany chuckles and raps a knuckle against the glass table. "Let me guess," she teases kindly. "You just packed a toothbrush?"

Blushing, Santana ducks her head to the scepter she's scanning with one of Brittany's gadgets. Her glasses jolt forward and she pushes them back up as she admits, "Actually, I didn't even pack that. I had to buy one at Rite Aid before I got on the ship."

Brittany snorts. When Santana risks an upward glance, Brittany's expression looks happy and almost surprised.

Clearing her throat, feeling her cheeks and throat grow warmer, Santana aims her eyes at the screen and tries to read the data. "The gamma signature matches the Tesseract," she says, her voice rougher than she expects. She sets Brittany's instrument on the counter and bites her lip. "It'll take a while to process the wavelength, though."

"Not if we bypass their mainframe."

Santana looks up, a little surprised, and sees Brittany navigating one of the transparent screens with speed and confidence. Brittany wears a wicked little grin; she seems to know Santana's looking. "If we use their systems to multitask, it'll go way faster."

"Using SHIELD's computers?" asks Santana hesitantly.

"Of course," says Brittany, light and teasing. She flashes Santana a lopsided grin and Santana leans more heavily on the glass table. Brittany shrugs and explains, more gently and less roguishly, "I mean, this is their mess. We might as well use their resources, right?"

Santana nods tentatively, tracing her fingertips over the glass. She watches Brittany tweak two more computer programs and rattles her brain for something intelligent to say.

"Those are quite some carpet bags you brought," she says, gesturing at the briefcases. "Mary Poppins would be jealous."

Instantly, she's wincing from the hefty kick she wants to give herself. Maybe she'll save another kick for the asshole who administered the IQ test and declared her a genius.

(The other girl is laughing at her.)

"You should come by Pierce Tower sometime," Brittany says, impossibly unbothered by Santana's lack of game. She's coming closer and Santana straightens up. "The top ten floors are all R&D," Brittany says with a gentle smile. "State-of-the-art. You'd love it. It's Candyland."

"I'm pretty bad at Candyland," Santana murmurs. Brittany's come to a stop, about a half-foot too close. Brittany slings her left arm over the monitor and leans like a beach bum on a surfboard. Even in an airship at night under flourescents, Brittany's hair and skin glow like she's on a sunlit beach in California.

Santana's mouth is so dry. Swallowing is worse.

Brittany stares, unblinking, eyes beautiful and clear.

"Besides," Santana rushes, dropping gracelessly onto her stool, "last time I was in New York, I kind of broke—Harlem." The blush flares in her cheeks: a reminder of why she shouldn't do this, and how close Brittany's standing.

(The other girl snickers at the mention of her antics, but the beauty of Brittany's face seems to confuse her.)

Brittany tilts her head. Something gleams in her eyes, but Santana can't identify it. "I promise a stress-free environment," Brittany hums, leaning close, close, close. Santana leans her elbows on the table to hide her nerves and Brittany circles around behind her, so close Santana can feel her body heat radiating through their shirts. "No tension," Brittany says, "no surprises—"

_Bzt._

"Ow!" Santana yelps, her knee stuttering against the underside of the table, her abdomen jerking and bowing away from the pain. She looks up in surprise and a dash of animal fear—

(Snix's grin looks like a grimace.)

—and Brittany's right there, their noses a hair's breadth apart, staring hard in Santana's eyes like she's about to change.

"Hey!" yells Finn, striding into the lab.

"Nothing?" asks Brittany, eyebrows raised. She looks almost impressed.

Santana's mouth hangs open.

Finn huffs. "Are you nuts?"

"You've really got it locked down," Brittany continues, unbothered. "What's your secret? Brainwashing? Mellow jazz? Huge bag of weed?"

Santana works her jaw, smiling despite herself, until Finn heaves an annoyed, long-suffering sigh. "Stop being an idiot," he shoots. Brittany looks at him as if surprised to find him standing there. "Not everything is a joke."

"Funny things are," Brittany says without cracking a smile.

Santana cracks one, even if they'd rather talk to the elephant in the room than talk to her.

(The elephant thinks it's pretty funny, at least.)

"You're putting everyone on this ship in danger. I don't think that's funny," Finn says with a grimace. As an afterthought, he glances at Santana. "No offense."

Santana rolls her eyes and shuffles on the stool. "Don't worry about me, Cap," she says wearily. "I wouldn't be here if I couldn't handle disrespect or… pointy things."

Finn's face contracts, like he thinks he should scowl, but he's not sure.

"You're tiptoeing," Brittany says, gesturing at Santana with her electric screwdriver-turned-weapon and wearing a reassuring smile. "You're hiding. You oughta strut." Brittany winks at her. "Show everybody the awesomeness that you are."

"From what I understand, the awesomeness that she is smashed half of New York into rubble," Finn sneers.

Brittany tilts her head, all mirth gone. "And from what I understand, you were five different flavors of popsicle when that happened. So how about we stick to what we know?"

"As long as  _you_  stick to the problem at hand," Finn bites, pointing at the scepter.

Brittany's eyebrows shoot up. "You think I'm not?"

The way Finn twitches his fingers and clenches his jaw serves to answer her. He folds his arms proudly over his chest.

"Why'd Holly call us in on this? Why now?" Brittany asks. She glances at Finn and Santana; Santana aims her gaze thoughtfully at the glass table and the black nail polish chipping off her thumb. Brittany looks back at Finn. "What isn't she telling us? I can't do the math without all the measures."

Finn frowns, confused. "You think Holly's hiding something?"

Brittany blinks at him. "She's a  _spy_ , Captain Crunch. She's  _the_ spy."

Finn's expression tightens, as if this is new information. Brittany glances at Santana with a secret smile. "It's bugging you, too," she says, reaching out to tap the back of Santana's hand with two fingers.

"I—uh—" Santana looks slowly from Brittany to Finn, who's glaring at her now instead of Brittany.

"Isn't it?" Brittany presses, pulling her hand back and hopping up to sit on the table.

Santana flounders. Finn's still glaring. "I—listen, I just wanna—" she sweeps her hands over the monitor and her notebook. "—do my work, and—"

"Doctor?" grates Finn. He plasters mild curiosity over his laser stare.

Instinctively, Santana turns to Brittany for backup, but Brittany seems as curious as Finn is trying to be. Santana stammers under their attention and turns back to her lap to center herself.

(The other girl rumbles happily at her anxiety.)

Slowly, Santana tugs her glasses off and holds them carefully between her fingers. "'A warm light for mankind to share.' Blaine's jab at Holliday."

A glance verifies she has their attention. Santana wets her lips.

"I think that was meant for you," she says, turning hesitantly to Brittany.

Brittany looks up and aside thoughtfully. She shuffles on the tabletop and laces her fingers together.

When it becomes clear Brittany's not going to interrupt and Finn's not going to argue, Santana clears her throat, sets her glasses on the table, and clasps her hands between her thighs. "Even if you haven't been working with SHIELD recently, Pierce Tower has been all over the news for—months and months."

"Pierce Tower?" asks Finn, raising an eyebrow and guffawing derisively. "That hideous—"

His eyes drift far enough to catch Brittany's murderous glare. Finn smacks his lips together. "—that  _building_  downtown?"

Brittany's annoyed and Finn looks constipated, so Santana clears her throat louder and says, "Yeah. It's run on a large-scale ARC reactor." She glances at Brittany; Brittany offers no corrections. "It'll run itself for—what, a year?"

Brittany smiles softly: proud. It almost feels like she's proud Santana knows all about Pierce Tower, rather than pride in the Tower itself. "And it's just a prototype," she says, turning to Finn to boast. At Finn's blank expression, Brittany smirks and explains, "I'm basically the squeaky-cleanest in clean energy right now."

"So," Santana drawls, "why didn't they bring her in on the Tesseract project?" A glance to the right, and Santana's rewarded with another proud, interested look from Brittany. "What's SHIELD doing in energy anyway?" she finishes.

Brittany's gaze darts down to Santana's lips. Santana gulps as her mouth goes dry again.

Before she can do something more embarrassing, like snap her glasses in half or fall off her stool, Brittany hops off the counter and tugs her t-shirt back into place. "I'll be sure to ask TUBBS the exact same question, once my decryption program finishes sneaking into SHIELD's secure files."

"I'm s-sorry, what?" stammers Santana.

"TUBBS?" asks Finn blankly.

"That's right," Brittany breezes, digging into her jeans pocket and pulling out a 28th-century phone that resembles the transparent computer screens she brought with her. She holds the phone up to Finn as if he'll understand anything it says. "It's been running since I hit the bridge. Pretty soon, we'll have every dirty secret SHIELD does." She flashes Santana that charming, roguish grin.

Santana blushes.

(Snix scoffs.)

"And you want them to trust you," Finn mocks, shaking his head like a teacher realizing a student is hopeless.

Brittany sighs; her annoyance breaks through. "They're an intelligence agency, and they're afraid of intelligence? Historically, not awesome."

"This is classic divide-and-conquer," Finn whines. "Blaine wants to weaken us and if we don't stay focused, it'll work."

Uneasily, Santana points out, "Blaine doesn't know about any of this. How could he be—"

"We have our orders," Finn pushes. He turns back to Brittany. "We should follow them."

Brittany cocks an eyebrow at Santana and tucks her phone back in her pocket. "Following's not really my style," she grins.

"And you're all about style," Finn derides, nose wrinkled and glancing at the Iron Maiden graphic on Brittany's chest.

"You're the one wearing an American flag in a research laboratory," Brittany bristles, "which, might I add, you have no place in."

Santana bites her lip. "Finn." He looks at her, clearly upset. Santana softens her voice and squints at him. "Really, honestly, none of this smells fishy to you?"

Finn's lips squirm. "Just find the cube," he spits finally, then turns on his heel and stalks out of the room.

* * *

After a moment, Brittany scoffs and walks back to Santana's monitor. "That's the guy my dad was obsessed with?" she mutters, leaning way into Santana's space and tilting the screen slightly to read the charts. "He had vintage trading cards and everything. I think he made a better popsicle."

"He fought Blaine," Santana offers, nervous of Brittany's closeness.

"So did I," Brittany gripes. "That guy has drunk about six gallons of Kool-Aid, and I think he's about to wet himself."

Santana laughs despite herself. "Gross."

Brittany turns—their faces are so close again—and smiles. Her gaze flicks down to Santana's lips again and Santana's cheeks heat up instantly. "People aren't meant to be sheep," Brittany hushes. "Sooner or later, he's gonna follow orders right off a cliff. I just hope I get to be there."

Brittany's eyes glint, mischievous and wicked.

"Yeah—well—" Santana looks down at the table again, smiling nervously. "I'm sure I'll read about it when it happens." She flips her glasses over against the table.

"Or"—Santana glances up and startles at the look in Brittany's eyes; Brittany smirks—"you'll be suiting up with the rest of us."

Despite Brittany's kind expression, Santana bites her lips into her mouth and looks away. "See—" She touches the screen, flipping idly between charts. "That's the thing. I don't get a suit of armor." She sucks in a deep breath, staring through the images on the monitor. "I'm exposed. Like a nerve."

Santana shudders and shakes her head.

(Her heartbeat feels like Snix pounding the bars.)

"It's a nightmare."

When she's gathered enough courage to look Brittany in the face, she finds something unfamiliar instead of the pity she expects. Brittany draws away from her slightly so she's sitting properly on the counter, twisted to watch Santana over her shoulder. "You know," Brittany says quietly, "that chunk of shrapnel is still trying to cut into my right ventricle. It tries every day." She taps the panel glowing softly through her shirt, just left of center. "This stops it. It's part of me now."

Brittany's looking at her lips again.

"Not just armor."

Santana breaks eye contact. "But you can control it," she says in a small voice.

Brittany shrugs. "Because I learned how."

"Not the same, not the same," Santana says, laughing humorlessly and playing with the screen again. Brittany swats Santana's hands away from the screen and Santana sits back to look at her, breathing a little fast.

(The other girl paces.)

"The shrapnel wants in," Santana whispers, dropping her eyes to the table. She can see her fingers twist together beneath the glass. "The—she— _it_ wants  _out_."

Again, Brittany quiets; Santana can feel her watching, so she keeps staring resolutely at her hands.

The computers hum. One of them beeps, after a long, stretched moment.

"I read about your accident," Brittany says. Santana notices Brittany's fingertip, drawing spirals on the glass at the edge of her vision. "That much gamma radiation… it really should've killed you."

Santana chokes out a laugh. "Are you saying it— _Snix_ saved my life?" Her voice wavers. "Or are you just saying I should've died?"

Brittany stares at her, smooth and even, her brow furrowed in sympathy or some other friendly emotion. Santana tries to tip her chin up higher: to be braver.

"I don't really know," Brittany murmurs, reaching out to tuck Santana's hair back behind her ear. Santana shivers at the touch. "But maybe that's the way the universe balanced it out. To keep you alive."

Santana looks aside and swallows. "My life for my control over it?"

Brittany touches Santana's hair again, though it hasn't shifted or fallen. She caresses the soft place behind Santana's ear and whispers, "To return good to the world, it had to return a little evil, too."

"You don't know I'm good," Santana scoffs, feeling alert and fearful.

(The other girl gripes and rattles her cage. It feels a little like butterflies.)

"Yes, I do," Brittany breathes. She's gotten closer, and she's looking at Santana's lips again.

Nervously, Santana manages, "You said she's part of me, though. So I'm evil, too."

Brittany's eyes look darker and deeper up close. Santana feels the breath against her face when Brittany murmurs, "Nobody's just good or just evil. We're all just people."

"Some of us are more than 'just people,'" Santana starts. Her expression, her eyes pinned to Brittany's, make it obvious which of them she's talking about.

Then Brittany kisses her.

Brittany smiles against Santana's lips as she does it, carefree and careful all at once, and her hand curls around the back of Santana's neck tenderly. Santana's not sure if she's about to combust or faint or change or maybe just fall off her stool: In the end, her body just goes rigid, so still she can feel the flutter of her heart beating.

(The other girl, for once, falls dead silent.)

"You're more than 'just people' too, Santana," Brittany confides, gentle and somber as she strokes Santana's hair where it sweeps back. "You're more than Snix."

The stiffness seeps into tremulous shaking. Santana can see it, where her wavering breath hits Brittany's long loose bangs, shifting them like a breeze. "You don't know anything about me," Santana whimpers, though she's finding it harder to believe every time she says it.

The way Brittany glances at her lips makes Santana brace herself for another kiss. Instead, as she holds Santana captive with her kindness, Brittany clicks her tongue softly and whispers, "You don't know anything about you, either."

* * *

Brittany's telling Santana a story about the first time she met Schuester when Holliday storms into the lab looking peeved.

"What the hell are you doing?" she asks, arms akimbo. Brittany hops off the counter with mock innocence. "Yes, you," Holliday pushes, pointing at Brittany and Santana in turn.

Santana shrinks back, an apology rising to her lips.

(The other girl sneers.)

"You're supposed to be looking for the Tesseract, not braiding each other's hair," Holliday presses.

"We are," Santana pipes up, unwilling to be scolded when they've done nothing wrong—besides kissing on the job, a little bit. "We logged the search algorithm and the server is sweeping for the Tesseract now."

Brittany steps toward Holliday. "We'll get a hit within half a mile, thanks to your exceedingly efficient Big Brother technology. George Orwell would be proud—or, should I say appalled—" Brittany comes to a stop beside a display monitor and tilts it to face Holliday. "Although, speaking of appalled, exactly what is Phase Two?"

Unfazed, Holliday raises her brows and folds her arms. "And how do you know about—"

"Weapons?" shouts Finn, throwing a formerly high-grade blaster on the metal counter near the wall. "Sorry," he says to Brittany drily, "computer was a little slow." To Holliday, he spits, "You're using the Tesseract to build weapons? Did SHIELD used to be spelled H-Y-D-R-A?"

Holliday huffs. "HYDRA had the Tesseract before, so we gathered everything we could to—"

"Sorry to interrupt," Brittany cuts in, pointing to a missile diagram on the screen, "but your lies are a little outgunned at the moment."

Finn says something to Holliday and Quinn and Sam jog into the room. "Did you two know about this?" asks Brittany, always assessing the situation, gesturing urgently to the schematics on the monitor.

Quinn ignores Brittany and pins Santana with a uniquely hostile glare. "You wanna think about removing yourself from this situation?" she threatens.

"I gave that a shot," Santana mutters, "but you thought Calcutta was too  _far_ removed. You're the one that brought me here."

Holliday, Finn, and Sam are staring at her, too. She can feel it.

(She can feel it.)

"Blaine's manipulating you," Quinn tries, taking a step forward.

Santana scoffs. "I haven't set foot in the same room—I haven't shared  _air_ with the guy. The only people manipulating me are in this room."

Quinn stops and narrows her eyes. "You didn't come here because I bat my eyelashes at you."

"Your eyelashes aren't gonna kick me out of my lab, either," Santana shoots back. She turns back to Holliday and pushes, "I'd like to know why SHIELD's making weapons that make Hiroshima look like a misfired flare gun."

Holliday sighs loudly and points at Sam. "Because of him."

That seems to catch Sam and Finn by surprise, even if no one else reacts visibly. "Me?" asks Sam, smiling nervously. "What?"

"Your brotherly spat leveled a small town," Holliday recounts unhappily. "Not only are we not alone in this universe; we're also sitting pretty at the bottom of the totem pole."

"Asgard has no fight with your people," Sam stammers.

"What if it did?" snaps Holliday. "And there's plenty of other worlds out there itching to take a bite out of us. I notice Blaine didn't have any trouble getting his hands on a bloodthirsty army-for-hire. We needed to send a signal."

Sam scoffs. "Wielding the Tesseract certainly sends a signal. A violent signal," he warns. "It signals to others that Earth is prepared for a conflict on that level."

"We need to appear formidable until we become formidable," Holliday bites. "We needed—"

"A nuclear deterrent?" chirps Brittany, sarcastically. "Holly, can you think of anything  _less_ likely to prevent interplanetary war?"

Holliday glares. "You got a better idea, Pierce?"

"If we don't know what they're packing, how do we know it'll even deter them?" asks Santana. "We could still be hilariously underprepared, but this way they know the best we've got before they show us their cards."

"Good grief," Finn whines, "stop mixing metaphors. This isn't helping find the Tesseract or stop Blaine."

(The other girl whines. Their ears ring.)

"Lay off her," Brittany spits. "You're the one so eager to follow you'd trail SHIELD into the mouth of a gun."

Quinn raises her voice. "You're all so naïve. SHIELD monitors potential threats. Without structure and order, all you get is chaos—"

(The ringing is louder. Sharper.)

"What do you think  _this_ is?" Santana demands, touching a finger to her temple. "You think we're a team? A club? No, no"—Brittany steps toward her; Santana frowns hard and looks at Quinn—"we're a chemical mixture that makes chaos. We're a time bomb."

(Buzzing.)

Quinn shakes her head. "You need to cool it—"

Brittany crosses her arms. "She's got a point. Would it kill you to let her talk for five seconds?"

"It just might," Finn says meanly. "You know she's a danger to all of us, so back off."

Brittany sizes him up. Her shoulders tense. "Oh, I'm starting to want you to make me."

(The other girl plugs her ears and whines.)

"Yeah." Finn snorts and steps into Brittany's space. "Puttin' the big-girl panties on in the suit of armor. Take that off, what are you?"

"A genius? A billionaire?"

Finn sneers. "I know guys with none of that worth ten of you."

Brittany raises an eyebrow in challenge. "Just because you count women as one-tenth of a person—"

"You always gotta make this about you," Finn blusters. "You're no saint. You look out for Number One. You're not the guy to lay down on the wire and let the other guy crawl over you."

"I'd just cut the wire," Brittany bites. "Not all of us have been genetically altered to survive a grenade blast to the face."

Finn looks straight at Santana.

(Snix rattles like a wolf stuffed in a birdcage.)

"Whatever," Finn says, turning back to Brittany, "but if you're not gonna step aside, you can at least stop playing the hero."

"Hero like what? Like you?" Brittany laughs; her eyes stay hard and her expression clouds over like a thunderstorm. "News flash, Hudson: You're a laboratory experiment. Everything special about you came out of a bottle."

Finn shows his teeth in an ugly smile. "Put on the suit. Let's go a few rounds."

Quinn inches toward Santana.

Suddenly, Sam chuckles. "You're being ridiculous," he announces. "Stop being so petty."

Brittany takes a half-step back, glancing around the room. Holliday sighs and gestures to Quinn. "Agent Fabray, would you please escort Dr. Lopez to her—"

"To my what?" Santana cuts in.

(Snix howls in her cage.)

"To my cell?" Holliday's face flickers. "You already rented it out."

Uneasily, Holly says, "That was just—"

"In case you needed to kill me," Santana bites. Her jaw aches where it clenches.

(The buzzing pitches to a shrill hum. It feels like the vibration will splinter the cage bars.)

Holliday squirms. "Well—"

"Well you can't," Santana spits, more bitterly than she expects. "I tried."

Her anger, as always, triggers reactions she'd rather avoid: Everyone stares at her. It makes her skin crawl.

(It makes her skin crawl.)

"I got upset," she admits, pitch climbing as the fear and panic seep out of the memory. "I didn't see a way out. So I put a bullet in my mouth and the other girl spit it out."

Santana shudders, but stares hard at each person in turn, daring them to question her integrity: her humanity. She doubts they'd have anything new to say.

"So I put it behind me," she manages, when no one says anything. She notices Brittany holding her breath. "I tried to focus on—on helping people," she says, choking on a lump in her throat, "and I was good, I was actually living a sort of life, and then you drag me back into this—this  _freak show_ and put everyone on this ship at risk. I didn't want to come in the first place, remember?"

(Snix pounds at her ribs until they ache.)

Santana glares hard at Quinn. "I didn't even have time to pack a toothbrush," she accuses with an incredulous laugh. Quinn looks away. Brittany breathes out. "You wanna know my secret, Agent Fabray? You wanna know how I stay calm?"

(The knot in her throat feels like Snix's fist.)

"Dr. Lopez."

Santana snaps her eyes to Holliday, who's staring at something waist-high. "What?" Santana snaps.

"Put down the scepter," says Finn from behind Holliday.

A glance confirms it. The gem glows; the gold shaft feels heavy in her fingers.

One of the tracking monitors beeps: a confirmed hit. Santana falters and puts the scepter back on the glass table. "Sorry, kids," she says halfheartedly, crossing over to the monitor. "Looks like you don't get to see my party trick after all."

Sam cuts in and says the Tesseract belongs on Asgard, though the indifference on Holliday's face indicates he may be late to the negotiating table on that one.

"I'm going after it," Brittany announces immediately.

Finn catches her arm as she turns to leave. "You're not going alone," he counters, frowning.

"I'm going wherever I damn well please," Brittany seethes, wrenching her arm from his grip.

Finn leans in her face again. "Put on the suit. Let's find out."

"I'm not afraid of you, old man." Brittany bares her teeth.

"Put on the suit," Finn grits.

The match on the monitor shows the Tesseract is in New York. The Tesseract is somewhere in Pierce Tower. Santana's jaw drops; she breathes, "Oh my god," and then the bomb goes off.

* * *

Glass breaks. It digs into Santana's palms and the backs of her hands; her right cheek, when she lands face-down.

The breath blows out of her.

(The cage creaks.)

Her ribs and thighs and cheekbone all punch back in pain, the first tingling aches spreading quickly.

(The other girl reaches out from the inside. She presses outward.)

"We're okay," says a voice beside her. Santana cracks her eyes open. Blond hair.

"We're okay," the voice repeats, and Santana's heart sinks. Not Brittany. Quinn.

(Snix bends the bars.)

Santana squeezes her eyes shut and grits her teeth. Her hands clench into fists.

(The first bar breaks.)

Santana moans mournfully as the pain in her abdomen quadruples. It feels like fingers are digging into the bruises from the inside.

(Snix smiles grimly.)

"Dr. Lopez?" says Quinn. Her voice sounds far away. "Think, Santana. You've gotta fight it."

The words barely register. Pain rips through her like knife-slashes of lightning.

(Snix is the fighter.)

"We're gonna be okay," Quinn pushes. Santana rocks back on her heels, arms stretched out long and tired before her, and Quinn chants, "We will get out of this. You will walk away. We're gonna be fine. You'll be fine."

(The second bar snaps.)

"Fuck you," Santana whimpers, a strangled shout, as the other girl crawls out from the inside, like a demon crawling out of a grave.

(The pain is unbelievable. First her bones grow too quickly, then her muscles: a tug of war. The pain wins over everything else.)

The green is coming out.

(The green is coming out.)

Santana shouts—cries—and everything goes dark.

* * *

_It's always the same dream._

_In a white room, Santana stands beside an examining table, waiting for the doctor. She peels her jacket off first, hanging it carefully over the arm of the chair beside the scale. She unbuttons her dress shirt, slowly; by the last button, she can see her knuckles are swollen and bloody. Red stains the cuffs when she pulls the shirt off._

_Her shoes and socks come next. She drops her trousers to her ankles. She steps out of them and catches sight of herself in the mirror. She's not green or monstrous, just bruised and bloody. Her body looks small and thin._

_A paper dress lays across the examining table. Santana reaches to unhook her bra, but when it falls to the floor, she finds she's wearing all her clothes again._

_The familiarity feels almost comforting. Santana begins the process again, careful of her aching body and her clean, crisp clothes._

_The doctor never comes._

_It's always the same dream._

* * *

_You fell out of the sky._

You fell out of the sky.

"You fell out of the sky."

Santana scrunches her face, frowning in confusion and discomfort and disorientation. Her body doesn't hurt the way it did in the dream, or when she fell through the glass on the ship.

The ship. Quinn. Santana drags herself upward and leans her hands on her knees, distantly surprised when her elbows touch skin. She opens her eyes and remembers: the backup clothes, designed to stretch, just in case. One experience of total and utter exposure was more than enough for this lifetime.

She sits in a crater in a pile of rubble. It looks like a Black-Eyed Susan with the Hershey's Kiss plucked out; she sits in the thumbprint.

Her head aches.

(Snix snickers contentedly.)

An old man in a security uniform stands to the side, looking at her. She squints at him in the harsh light. "Did—did I hurt anybody?" she asks timidly.

The man shrugs. "Ain't nobody here to hurt," he replies with a smile.

Her breath releases. "Lucky," she says. Her voice is hoarse.

"Or good aim," the man says, shrugging easily. "You were awake when you fell."

Santana's eyes widen and she glances at him anxiously. "You—saw?"

He nods, almost proud. "The whole thing. Right through the ceiling. Big and green and hollering like a hungry newborn. Here," he adds, tossing a pile of clothes toward her.

Santana blushes at the kindness. They're men's clothes, but small enough to fit her. She tugs the jeans on over the black spandex underwear.

"I figured they wouldn't fit you 'til you shrunk back down to regular size," the man says, strangely nonchalant.

"Thank you," Santana says hesitantly, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

The man tilts his head while Santana stands to fasten the pants. She tugs the t-shirt on over her bra. "You an alien?" asks the man, startling her so she gets caught in the neck and arms of the shirt.

"An alien?" she gasps, fighting with the fabric until it sits properly. She looks at him.

"From outer space," he says impatiently. "An alien."

Santana shakes her head before she finds her voice. "N—no, not an alien," she answers, realizing the shirt's backwards and tugging her arms in to twist the shirt around.

The man leans against a protruding block of wood and clicks his tongue. "Well, then, miss, you've definitely got a condition."

* * *

It turns out the other girl landed closer to the city than Santana suspected. Only when she's straddling the security guard's rust bucket of a motorcycle does she realize she could just walk away.

"Something bad's happening, isn't it?" asks the man warily.

Santana bites her lips and nods. Her left thigh quivers against the bike when she reaches up to tuck her hair behind her ear. "I have to help them," she says when the guard just stands there.

He looks at her critically. "Who's 'them'? Pals of yours?"

"Not—not really," she says, frowning. "Just—the only other people who can help."

He nods seriously. His gaze drifts over her shoulder; Santana twists on the bike and almost falls over when she sees the blue funnel opening up in the sky.

"Shit," she whispers. "Shit, shit, shit—" She looks down at the bike, trying to figure out how to start it up.

"Here, like this," says the guard, stepping closer to help her with the clutch. Once the engine blusters into life, he nods toward the city and points. "Take this road most of the way, but you'll have to turn right when you get close to the highway so you can get on the bridge."

With a gulp, Santana walks the bike backward to aim down the road. "Thank you," she says suddenly. The guard smiles and she smiles back. "For everything, I mean. I'll pay you back for—"

"Don't," he says, shaking his head. "If you don't get outta here now, neither of us is gonna be around to worry about debt, anyhow."

Santana bites her lips. She wants to say more—to insist—but.

(But.)

When she squints, she can see moving figures swooping out of the hole in the sky. She revs the motorcycle and heads down the road.

* * *

_I'll let you out to help them._

(The other girl rumbles.)

_Lots of tasty violence in it for you. Army of alien monsters, full of squishy parts._

(Nothing. Snix grips the bars of her cage.)

_More fun than chasing Quinn, or—_

Suddenly, Santana jolts, nearly falling off the motorcycle before she catches herself with a shallow turn. Quinn was there, during the last change; Santana gulps and hopes, tentatively, that Quinn made it out okay.

(Snix smirks at her, darkly satisfied.)

Santana scowls and wonders what possessed her to try to bargain with her worse half. "Fuck," she whispers into the wind, "you make me so—"

(Snix grins wider and clenches the bars.)

Santana grips the handlebars.

* * *

The city looks like shit. Between the glass and debris on the road and the age of her borrowed motorcycle, Santana nearly falls three different times. Her grip gets tighter and tighter on the handlebars as she ducks flying aliens and sideswipes upturned cars.

It's also her first time riding a motorcycle half a century old.

When she follows the trail of dead aliens into the heart of the city, she immediately recognizes the ragtag cluster of costumes. As if on cue, the motorcycle sputters to an anticlimactic death between two lumps of smoldering detritus, and Santana waddles to a stop several yards from the others, who look about as dusty and ragged as the city around them.

Quinn—alive!—Sam, and a tall Asian guy with a plastic longbow turn immediately toward her. Finn, decked out in his flag outfit and topped with a little blue hood, turns a second after, when he realizes no one is listening to him.

A little part of Santana sinks when she sees Brittany isn't with them.

Santana dismounts awkwardly—the bike has no kickstand, and falls flat on its side the second she lets go—and shuffles toward them in her outsize shoes.

"So," Santana says, shoving her hands in her pockets and lifting her shoulders. "This all seems… horrible."

Quinn comes to a stop, closest to her, and crosses her arms. "I've seen worse," she says, raising an eyebrow.

Santana bites her lip. "Sorry."

"No—" Quinn's lips twist into a small smile. "We could use a little worse, I think."

(The other girl grins and stamps her feet.)

"Pierce," says Finn, surprising and confusing Santana until he touches an earpiece in his hood, "we got her. Just like you said."

Santana's mouth drops open a little, full of questions, but a half-second later, an enormous scaled eel makes a clumsy flying turn around a building several blocks down. It screeches, long and loud; Santana squints at the shape preceding it and finds herself smiling to recognize Brittany in her renowned red and gold Iron Maiden suit.

A voice behind her—probably the tall guy she doesn't recognize—says, "I don't see how that's a party," presumably into the earpiece comm channel.

Santana glances back at them: Sam grips his hammer; tall guy grips his bow; Finn screws on his constipation face; Quinn touches the gun at her hip. As if in slow motion, Santana turns back to face the oncoming eel monster.

(Snix is strangely calm. She touches the latch on the cage door, waiting for the warden to bring the key.)

"Lopez," says Finn.

Santana twists and raises an eyebrow at him.

He bites his lips. "Now might be a good time to get upset."

Santana chuckles. "Now you tell me," she says as she takes a step away from them, toward the catastrophe.

(Snix stands at attention when the key turns.)

"I'm serious," Finn insists, "time to get angry if you—"

"I'm always angry," Santana calls over her shoulder.

Her spine twinges as the first change starts.

(Snix slams the door open. As always, the bones grow first.)

Her muscles tear to catch up. What starts as a high wail comes out a low, pained grunt.

The green is coming out.

(The green is coming out.)

Everything goes dark.

* * *

_It's always the same dream._

_In a white room, Santana stands beside an examining table, waiting for the doctor. She peels her jacket off first, hanging it carefully over the arm of the chair beside the scale. She unbuttons her dress shirt, slowly; by the last button, she can see her knuckles are swollen and bloody. Red stains the cuffs when she pulls the shirt off._

_Her shoes and socks come next. She drops her trousers to her ankles. She steps out of them and catches sight of herself in the mirror. She's not green or monstrous, just bruised and bloody. Her body looks small and thin._

_A paper dress lays across the examining table. Santana reaches to unhook her bra, but when it falls to the floor, she finds she's wearing all her clothes again._

_The familiarity feels almost comforting. Santana begins the process again, careful of her aching body and her clean, crisp clothes._

_The doctor never comes._

_It's always the same dream._

_Then the door opens._

* * *

It feels like a dream: all images, no actions. Iron Maiden falling out of the sky.

_The white room._

Brittany's hard armor, clutched to her chest, cradled in heavy green arms.

_The chair beside the scale._

Sam tears off the mask. Brittany's blank expression and closed eyes.

_The white room._

(Snix thunders.)

* * *

The team's helping itself to an ambulance's supplies when Santana wakes, curled up in the caved-in hood of a car.

"Hey," says someone above her. Santana squints up into the sunlight and finds the one face not beside the ambulance: Brittany, helmet perched on her hip, blond hair spun in backlit gold. Brittany is smiling at her.

"Wh… what…" Santana braces her palm against the metal below her and winces at the stiffness of her body. She touches her forehead—partially just to check it's still intact—and hisses when moving presses a glass shard into her leg.

"I was wondering how long you'd take to come around," Brittany says, oddly cheerful considering how badly beaten everyone looks. Behind her, Santana can see Quinn and her archer friend taping gauze pads to their wounds.

Everything feels fast and muddled. Santana feels strangely quiet, despite the sirens shrieking past them. She touches her heart and listens inside herself.

(Nothing. The other girl sleeps soundly.)

"I brought you some clothes," Brittany says. She holds out a little bundle of folded fabric and Santana blinks slowly until she realizes she's wearing the SHIELD-grade underwear set again.

A blush spreads instantly over her cheeks and Santana forces herself upright when she grabs the clothes. "Thanks," she says throatily, tugging jeans from the bottom of the pile and yanking them up her legs. She shimmies her hips against the car to get the waistband over her hips. Brittany watches every movement attentively; Santana just about swallows her tongue at the look of Brittany's eyes.

Santana clears her throat. Brittany just smiles a little and watches Santana's hands spreading the t-shirt across her knees. "Where'd you get these?" Santana asks, mostly to distract Brittany.

"I made Finn grab 'em from some store on our way up the street," Brittany says, glancing into Santana's eyes for a second.

"You stole them?" Santana asks. She pulls the shirt over her head and tugs it down over her sports bra to hide her body from Brittany's warm stare.

Brittany smiles. "Look around. You think somebody's gonna miss them?"

A quick survey of the disarray around them proves Brittany's point. "Guess not," Santana mumbles, surprised to find socks still sitting beside her on the hood. She's about to ask, but Brittany reaches down and produces a pair of sneakers with a proud grin. Santana smiles sheepishly, brushes off the soles of her feet, and tugs the socks on.

"So, I guess we did it?" asks Santana awkwardly. The shoes are a suspiciously accurate fit.

"Absofruitly," Brittany says with a grin. Santana blinks and offers another tentative smile. Brittany tucks Santana's hair behind her ear and emphasizes, "We all did it."

Brittany's fingertips feel like fire. Or electricity.

(The other girl still sleeps. Maybe these really are butterflies.)

"Anything you wanna bring me up to speed on?" Santana asks, with the same trepidation her college friends used to wear when asking about blackout-drunk shenanigans.

Brittany's smile softens and her eyes grow deep. It makes Santana nervous.

Brittany reaches out again and traces the shell of Santana's ear. "You saved my life," she says, her deep look belying her habitual cocky grin.

"She did?" croaks Santana.

The grin melts and Brittany's eyes shine, like they're wet. Brittany leans closer and cradles Santana's jaw. "No,  _you_ did," she whispers.

They're about to kiss when Sam ruins it. "Come on, let us find food," he calls.

Brittany smiles serenely, brushes her thumb over Santana's cheek, and perks up to face Sam. "You better mean shawarma," she announces, holding her hand out to help Santana up out of Snix's car-nest. "'Cause I was serious."

"Shawarma?" Santana asks, stumbling off the hood and trailing Brittany to the ambulance.

"Yeah," Brittany says, grabbing Santana's hand. "I saw a food joint with a sign in the window. I dunno what it is, but I wanna try it."

"We have more pressing matters," Quinn sighs. She gestures at Finn, who's holding his chin with both hands. "Finn busted his jaw, so we need a real medic."

Brittany purses her lips and says nothing. The tall guy sighs. "I'll go grab one," he offers, jogging off around the ambulance to where the emergency workers are tending a clump of civilians.

Santana squeezes Brittany's fingers shyly. Brittany turns to her and Santana makes a small pout, using Brittany's shoulder to block it from Finn's sight.

Brittany grins and squeezes back.

* * *

Shawarma turns out to be pretty awesome. It's even better with Brittany's hand on her knee. They sit beside each other and Sam declares it fate that they use opposite hands to eat; Quinn rolls her eyes at him and stares pointedly at the table where she suspects they're holding hands.

Finn looks sullenly at their food, bound by doctor's orders and several wires to keep his mouth closed.

When Sam makes a scene by smashing his cup on the floor, Brittany leans in and presses a quick kiss to Santana's cheek. "Thanks for socking Finn, by the way," Brittany whispers.

Santana spits her water back in her glass. "What?"


	2. Iron Maiden

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Brittany turns back to the screen's profile of Dr. Santana Lopez. It flashes between faculty and research staff ID photos and crappy security cam footage of a big, buff Ms. Hyde smashing concrete in black spandex.
> 
> "I'm in."

After four months of fighting with New York City's electric grid and the public servants entrusted to its maintenance and care, Brittany's getting pretty annoyed that no city employees are apparently able to patch her on or off public electric power. Today, however, is supposed to be the last alteration before Pierce Tower goes live, so Brittany's whistling to herself as she cuts into a pipe deep under the bay. She hooks up the interrupt box and installs a feedback meter while she's at it.

"What are you whistling?" says Becky over the headset in Brittany's helmet. "You can't whistle Iron Maiden; it's wrong."

Brittany kicks the thrusters and shoots up out of the water. "I can whistle it if I want to," she says, smirking as she shoots forward over the water and toward the city.

"Nuh-uh. It's rock. You can't whistle rock."

"It's metal," Brittany corrects, flying high over busy streets with flickering lights. "And I reserve the right to pay homage to them however I please. Anyway," she presses on before Becky can interrupt again, "everything's go on my end. Give it a whirl. Time to become a beacon of self-sustained light."

With a huff, Becky says, "Assuming the reactor works."

"I do so assume."

"You shouldn't assume," Becky scolds. "Are we off-grid?"

Brittany rolls her eyes with a smile and hangs a wide right turn. "That's what I meant by 'everything's go.' Light 'er up."

Becky says nothing, but up ahead, the ribs of Pierce Tower flicker on. The white glow spreads upward through the edges until it fills in  _PIERCE_ along the upper rim.

"How does it look, boss?" Becky asks.

"Like Christmas," Brittany says with a wide smile as she leans back and flies up the face of it. "Except, I'm used to seeing a star at the top, instead of my name."

Happily, Becky says, "You  _are_ a star, remember?"

"Yeah," Brittany breathes, hovering to a careful stop on the circular landing pad. She bites her lips and steps forward; the weight of her foot triggers the new disassembly mechanism, which rears up behind her and clutches at her armor.

TUBBS chirps, "SHIELD Agent Phil Coulson is on the line."

"Nooo," Brittany groans. "Tell him I'm busy making a historic development in clean energy. No—tell him I'm busy getting plastered at that dive bar he hates."

"I'll tell him you're unavailable," TUBBS says drily.

"Do that."

The chest and back plates click apart and retract into the floor. Brittany watches the machines, amazed, as always, to find her creations moving fluidly through their tasks.

"I'm afraid he's insisting," TUBBS says, the computerized vocal pitch twinging as he sighs.

"Cut him off. I'm officially off the clock, even if he isn't," Brittany adds, stepping carefully out of the metal boots as they peel away from her shins.

Becky greets her with a smile and a flute of champagne. "Congratulations, Brittany," she says.

Brittany takes the glass and gives her a high-five in return. "It's better than I imagined," Brittany admits.

"I guess your imagination is your next project, then."

* * *

Becky's whining about leaving for the night and Brittany's staring at her holoscreens and trying to decide where to build the second tower when Phil walks out of the penthouse elevator.

"Rude," Becky declares in protest, gesturing emphatically from where she stands beside the window.

"Phil," Brittany corrects flatly. "I thought I explicitly blew you off."

Phil nods at them each in turn. He hesitates at the steps with the twitchy smile he wears when he's not sure if Brittany will do what he wants. "What is it?" Brittany asks without turning; she watches his lips squirm in the reflection off the window her desk faces.

"There's a bit of a situation," he says, gesturing with the thick black folder in his hand. Brittany reaches behind her with her left hand while she types with her right and makes grabbing motions until he puts the folder between her fingers.

Phil still sounds nervous when he starts to narrate what she's reading on the inside page. "It's called the Tesseract, and it's got something to do with gamma radiation. What's important is it's been stolen."

"Find someone else to play fetch with," Becky snaps.

Brittany's smile never reaches her lips. She's assembled the glass screens tucked behind the top briefing memo and frowns at the familiar information. "What's important is this file is about the Avengers. I thought you scrapped that."

Phil shifts uncomfortably. "It's being reconsidered."

"You mean  _I'm_ being reconsidered?" she asks with mock graciousness. She sets the doc display on her desk and surfs through the background data. When Phil doesn't say anything, she looks at him. "I thought I didn't qualify."

The way he squirms only verifies that he hasn't caught her amusement. "As I said, it's being reconsidered, in a new form. A response team."

"I don't play well with others," Brittany warns. She turns the screen halfway toward Phil and points at the words captioning her mug shot. "They got that right the first time around."

"Desperate times call for desperate measures," Phil answers, trying to sound confident and failing endearingly.

Becky cuts in. "What's the Avengers?"

"What about everybody else?" Brittany asks before Becky gets an answer. Brittany swipes back and forth between profiles and looks at Phil expectantly. "Am I the belle of the ball, or a fallback?"

Phil scratches the back of his neck. "There's no  _I_ in team."

"But if you want a  _me_ in team, you're gonna need a team to go with me." Brittany eyes him and tries not to smile. "Am I really the first one you asked?"

"No!" he blurts. He shrugs awkwardly. "Third."

"Worst party ever," Becky grumps.

Brittany laughs. "Go ahead, invite Old Man America and the assassin and"—she pauses to glance at her screen and raises her eyebrows—"Dr. Jekyll? Seriously?"

"She was the second," Phil says, almost proudly.

Brittany raises her eyebrows. "Wait, really? Is she in?"

"Dr. Jekyll isn't real," Becky points out.

"Dr. Lopez is," Brittany says.

Phil checks his phone and opens a text message. "Actually, yes," he says, clearly surprised.

"Who cares?" whines Becky.

Brittany turns back to the screen's profile of Dr. Santana Lopez. It flashes between faculty and research staff ID photos and crappy security cam footage of a big, buff Ms. Hyde smashing concrete in black spandex.

"I'm in."

* * *

"Agent Fabray," Brittany says with a smile once TUBBS hacks into the helicopter's system. "You miss me?"

"Hardly," Brittany can hear Fabray sigh into her mic.

Just for shits and giggles, Brittany has TUBBS worm into the PA system and blast the opening chords of "Run to the Hills," just in case the other half of this retrieval team hasn't figured out who's here.

Of course, Captain America probably doesn't know anything about Iron Maiden, but there's no time like the present to start that education.

Fabray doesn't even turn around when Brittany lands behind her in the jet's open hangar. "That's Captain Underpants?" asks Brittany as her visor opens, following Fabray's sightline to the star spangled blob fighting the beetle on the open plaza.

"New and improved," Fabray deadpans without turning. "Nice background music, by the way."

"Microwaving him doesn't mean he's not still leftovers," Brittany mutters.

Fabray glances at her with an eyebrow raised. "What was that?"

"Nothing." Brittany zips back out into the air and down to where the Captain's getting his lumpy ass handed to him.

Chanting  _team player team player_ over and over only holds her off for about fifteen seconds before she immobilizes Blaine with two well-placed palm repulsor shots.

"I totally had him," Finn mutters as he comes up behind her, and Brittany just grits her teeth behind her helmet. She's got her palm and six miniature automatic weapons aimed at him, but he speaks before she can.

"I surrender," says Blaine with this slimy smirk.

Finn grins. "Awesome."

* * *

"I don't like this," Finn mutters, scuffing his shoe against the floor. Blaine still wears his weasel-grin where he sits with his hands bound.

Brittany rocks on the balls of her feet. "What, him giving up so easy, or him giving up to me?"

Finn purses his lips. "Holliday didn't tell me they were calling you in."

"She doesn't report to you, Capsicle," Brittany winks with a smile, just to annoy him.

Finn's about to say something back—probably along the lines of  _your face doesn't report to you_ —when a storm rocks the jet like a child's crib. Fabray barely says "What the—" before a big blond blur smashes through the ceiling, grabs Blaine, and leaps back out into the open air. Brittany jumps out after him while Finn blubbers, and she knocks the beetlenapper off a cliff and into a forest pretty easily.

The guy has a big mouth, a dopey grin, and a hairstyle somewhere between Justin Bieber and the  _Hercules_ TV show. "Don't touch me," he warns, raising his eyebrows and holding his free hand flat. He clutches a sledgehammer in the other.

"Then don't take my stuff," Brittany says, smiling.

"You cannot shelter my brother from the consequences of his actions," he says in this weird lumbering lilt.

"I  _am_ the consequences of his actions," Brittany snarks, repulsors at the ready. She's pretty sure this is Sam, the alien who decimated a town out west a while back. TUBBS confirms it.

Sam huffs and yells, "He must face Asgardian justice," in what must be a bad impersonation of someone.

"I just want the cube. He coughs that up and he's yours." Brittany's mask shifts back over her face and she turns to retrieve the captive.

The guy grunts and swings at her, and she catches the hammer square in the chest. It knocks her clear off her feet and into one of the evergreens surrounding them. Brittany grunts at the pain echoing in her chest and climbs to her feet.

Sam's swinging the hammer in a circle, looking up at the peak where Blaine the Beetle still sits, so Brittany pumps the thrusters and flies straight into Sam's torso. She's satisfied when it knocks him almost as far as he knocked her, and his hammer falls a few feet away.

As she takes a deep breath and braces her feet to shoot again, Sam's hammer jerks back into his hand and Sam raises it to suck lightning down from the sky. Brittany barely has time to curse and widen her eyes before Sam aims his hammer and redirects the lightning straight at the glowing center of her armor.

Lightning is one of the few tests she didn't put the Mark VI through, and Brittany feels a shock of white-cold terror as the electricity hums all along her skin, buzzing ominously through the electrofibers of her suit and sending a thick hum through the arc reactor nestled against her sternum. For an instant, she's positive she's dying; there's no pain, though, and she squints at her periphery screens while her battery bar goes haywire and the suit crackles around her. "Battery at 468%," TUBBS narrates when it calms down, sounding tinny and watery in her ear.

"Aw, so close," Brittany says with a grin, because 69 is always a hilarious number, just before she empties most of that in a gut-shaking blast that hits Sam square in his barrel chest.

Sam jumps high in the air and Brittany jolts up to catch him. They're punching each other while they fly around until they nose-dive back into the dirt.

Once they're upright again, Brittany narrowly dodges a blow that would have incapacitated the left elbow joint of the Mark VI. She hits him with a blast that barely fazes him and a mighty kick to the nads that definitely fazes him.

"How unsportsmanlike," he groans in half-falsetto, cupping himself with one hand and raising his hammer with the other.

Then Captain America's there, messing everything up again, and smacking Sam in the face with his shield. Sam staggers and rubs his nose, but he gets a solid hit against the side of Finn's face and runs over toward Brittany.

They match blows for a solid thirty seconds, but then he gets hold of her right forearm and starts crushing the metal bare-handed. He's probably leaving fingerprints in the metal where it presses hard into the muscle of her arm, quickly passing discomfort and heading toward  _He's going to break my fucking arm in half_.

"Hey, over here!" yells Finn, making himself useful for once. "Didn't anybody ever tell you not to hit a girl?"

Brittany doesn't even get the chance to roll her eyes before Sam takes the hint and lunges at Finn. He swings the hammer and it connects with the shield in what is either the best or worst trap ever designed.

The reverberation is almost worse than the lightning strike was. Again, the arc reactor hums in that way that makes Brittany certain her heart is about to stop for real this time.

By the time they recover, Finn is looking at them like he's about to say  _I told you so_. "Are we done here?" he asks, voice patronizing.

Brittany sullenly hopes Fabray is going to take her side on how ridiculous this whole thing is.

* * *

It takes all of four minutes for Brittany to decide that Finn Hudson is actually the worst person she could possibly be sharing space with, including the annoying anti-corporations activist whose sharply worded letters became sharply worded musicals posted on YouTube. Brittany endures two more hours on the plane listening to him attempt to flirt with Black Widow, and no number of whiskey-cokes can improve the experience.

To top it off, he's largely ineffective against the Tesseract hoarder with the beetle horn fetish, and Brittany's  _team player team player_ mantra only holds her off for three minutes before she immobilizes Blaine with a few choice palm repulsor blasts.

* * *

They hand Blaine off to a SHIELD SWAT team as soon as they land on the helicarrier. Word is, they're taking him to the glass cage they built for Snix after her first outbreak. The others head to the bridge to watch Holly's preliminary interrogation, but Brittany's so tired of Finn and Fabray and Blaine's stupid smarmy smile, she takes a detour to say hello to Phil and ask after his cellist lady friend.

Brittany's walking Phil to the bridge, insisting he bring Rebecca the cellist to a romantic dinner for two in Pierce Tower's penthouse, when she overhears, "You said he was in Germany for the iridium. What does he need iridium for?"

"A stabilizing agent," Brittany answers helpfully as the doors open. She glances around the room and notes Finn, Fabray, and Sam have added Holly, Schuester the idiot of a SHIELD agent, and what can only be Dr. Santana Lopez to their number.

Brittany forces her eyes away from Santana, who looks an odd counterpart to Snix in her plain gray slacks and dull red dress shirt. The shirt is just a touch too big across the shoulders; she clutches dark-rimmed glasses nervously in front of her. Brittany focuses on the iridium and continues, "He needs the iridium so the Tesseract won't collapse in on itself, like when it made that mess at SHIELD."

Her path brings her past Sam, and she smiles at him and smacks his arm gently. "No hard feelings, trouty mouth. You got a mean swing."

She sticks the access bug on the underside of Holly's computer. "A stable portal"—she swings back around and stops behind the empty chair next to Sam—"can also open wider and stay open longer."

"Perfect if you've got a big, ugly alien army you need to move," Finn gripes.

Fabray cuts him off before he can continue; Brittany's never liked her more. "He has the iridium," she snaps. "Anything else he needs that can buy us time?" Brittany smiles cheekily when Fabray glares at her again, but Fabray, curiously enough, looks away to raise an eyebrow at Santana.

To save Santana, who looks positively terrified of answering Fabray's unspoken question, Brittany pipes back up. "Your defector. Chang, was it?" It gets Fabray's attention faster than a slap to the face. Brittany stays blank-faced despite her amusement. "He can get his hands on the other raw materials pretty easily. All he needs now is a little kick to kick-start the cube, and then he's good to go and we're… gone." She snaps her fingers.

Again, Finn speaks. "You seem awfully happy about it."

"Since when are you an expert in thermonuclear physics?" asks Schuester from where he stands behind Finn. He's either insulting her on purpose or insulting her by accident—which would be annoying, if Schuester weren't about the second dumbest person in this room after Finn.

"Last night. When I read Dr. Selvig's notes."

No one speaks up. Brittany's a little surprised; she'd assumed at least Santana would have read them, or Fabray, the overachiever, but Fabray says nothing and Santana plays wallflower away from the table. Brittany notes with surprise—which quickly turns to a quiet satisfaction—that although Santana can't meet her eyes, she can't stop eyeing her body.

"The extraction theory papers?" Brittany tries, glancing around at Finn and Fabray. "Am I seriously the only one who did the homework?"

Nothing. Santana fiddles with her glasses, but no one answers her until Finn sighs in irritation. "What kind of power source does he need? Will anything do? Like a flare, or—"

"He needs to heat it up," says the voice that welcomed Brittany to the room. It's Santana's, warm and rough. She twists her glasses around like rolling a kite string up on a peg. "He'd need to get it to at least… no, a lot more than 100 million Kelvin, just to break through the Coulomb barrier."

She looks so nervous. Brittany feels a warm little twinge as she smiles back. "Unless Selvig's figured out how to stabilize the quantum tunnel effect," Brittany concludes with a wink.

Santana blushes and adjusts her footing, apparently three seconds away from fainting or turning green. "W-Well, if he could do that, he could achieve heavy ion fusion in every—in any reactor he gets his hands on."

With her best attempt at a reassuring smile, Brittany walks toward Santana and quips, "Finally, someone on this boat speaks English." Santana braces one palm delicately against the wall behind her, a little short of breath.

"English?" whines Finn. "That's what that was?"

Brittany ignores Finn and shakes Santana's hand. Santana's palm is sweaty and she's looking at Brittany like Brittany's about to bite her throat or shove her tongue down it. "It's good to meet you, Dr. Lopez," Brittany says, a little delighted at Santana's ingenuous, obvious interest. Santana's mouth drops open, but she says nothing; Brittany's fingertips brush Santana's wrist as their hands drop apart. "Your work on anti-electron collisions is unparalleled."

It's clear, now, just how hopeless Santana is: even now, she just stares. Brittany bites her lip happily. "I'm also a big fan of the way you lose control and turn into an enormous green rage monster," she teases, taking in Santana's face, only made-up at the eyes and lips and redder at the rounds of her cheeks.

"I'm not sure you should be," Santana says. Her voice sounds even nicer when she's aimed it at Brittany. Santana wipes her hand on the back of her thigh, trying to be surreptitious and failing beautifully.

Brittany's about to say something back when Holly breezes past them. "Dr. Lopez is only here to track the Tesseract," Holly says sternly. "Nothing more."

Either Holly's presence or her words calm Santana slightly; her shoulders relax slightly and she hooks one arm of her glasses into her collar. Brittany notices a black undershirt covering any potentially uncovered cleavage where Santana's shirt lies open.

"I was hoping you'd be able to pitch in," Holly adds, snapping Brittany out of her boob haze.

Right as Brittany turns, Finn suggests, "Start with the stick." He touches his belly and screws his face up. "It doesn't look like much, but it packs a punch."

Brittany draws a deep breath, preparing to tell Finn exactly how interested she is in hearing his voice again at any time in the next month and a half, when Holly cuts in with a nod. "Sounds like a good idea. It sure looks matchy-matchy with the cube. I'd also love to know how it turned a bunch of my expensive, remarkably well-trained operatives into a gaggle of flying monkeys…. Or is it a pack?"

Unhappily—still sore at Finn—Brittany says, "A pack, I think."

"Monkeys?" Sam frowns. "I do not—"

"I do!" Finn beams; everyone stares at him. " _Wizard of Oz_. I… understood that reference."

With Herculean effort, Brittany restrains herself and rolls her eyes. After an appropriate moment of silence for the scarecrow's brain, Brittany turns to Santana and says, "Shall we play, Doctor?"

Shyly, Santana smiles back and nods.

"After you." Brittany gestures to the hallway.

"Thank you, Ms. Pierce," Santana says on her way past, sounding for all the world like a schoolgirl staying after class.

"Call me Brittany." It's a little early for schoolgirl stuff.

Without turning, Santana fiddles with her hair and whispers, "Okay."

* * *

The embarrassed goo-goo eyes turn appreciative when Brittany starts unpacking her equipment. Eventually, Brittany smirks and knocks the glass exam table with her knuckle. "Let me guess: You just packed a toothbrush."

Ever-bashful, Santana bends her head down to stare closely at the portable gamma reader she holds over the scepter. "Actually, I didn't even pack that. I had to buy one at Rite Aid before I got on the ship."

Typical SHIELD. Brittany snorts. Santana glances at her—meets her eyes nervously—and turns back to squint at the data. "The gamma signature matches the tesseract."

The words scratch the lower edge of her register; Brittany wonders, unbidden, if that's what Santana sounds like when she's turned on, and immediately scrubs the thought from her mind before she blushes as red as her armor.

"It'll take a while to process the wavelength, though," Santana adds.

Brittany shrugs. "Not if we bypass their mainframe." Brittany walks over to a screen to make it so; she grins when she feels Santana's eyes on her. "If we use their systems to multitask, it'll go way faster," she says, though she's pretty sure Santana knows that.

"Using SHIELD's computers." Santana sounds half doubtful, half awed.

"Of course." Brittany glances at her, still grinning, and shrugs. "I mean… this is their mess. We might as well use their resources, right?"

Brittany enters custom codes into the programs. Eventually, Santana comments, "Those are quite some carpet bags you brought. Mary Poppins would be jealous."

Mary Poppins. Adorable. "You should come by Pierce Tower," Brittany offers, carefully casual. She approaches Santana and explains, "The top ten floors are all R&D. State-of-the-art. You'd love it; it's Candyland."

Santana aims her eyes downward when Brittany closes in on her personal space; Brittany could count every eyelash from where she stands. "I'm pretty bad at Candyland," Santana murmurs.

Brittany tilts her head and leans on the monitor, wearing a slight smile and waiting curiously for Santana to say what she really means.

It doesn't quite work. "Besides," Santana says, suddenly plopping down on the stool, "last time I was in New York, I kind of broke—Harlem."

There it is. First mention of the alter ego. "I promise a stress-free environment," Brittany says softly, leaning closer. Santana hunches over the table; Brittany swipes an electric screwdriver and circles behind Santana's back, eyeing the graceful bumps along her spine. "No tension," Brittany soothes, "no surprises—"

The screwdriver buzzes against Santana's side. Santana yelps and knocks the table with her knee, jerking in a curve away from the pain. Brittany peers closely at the surprise and alarm on her face, but sees no hint of rage nor tinge of green. Santana opens her mouth, probably to ask Brittany to move away, but they're interrupted by none other than Captain Underpants, Shit Stain of America.

"Hey!" he yells, lumbering into their lab like Snix into a crystalware store.

"Nothing?" Brittany asks, hoping to ignore him out of existence and still fixated on Santana's apparent control of her other half.

Santana's mouth hangs open.

"Are you nuts?" demands Finn, wheeling his arms uselessly.

"You've really got it locked down," Brittany murmurs. She's duly impressed. "What's your secret? Brainwashing? Mellow jazz? Huge bag of weed?" she reels off while Santana stares, stunned.

"Stop being an idiot," Finn whines. Finally, Brittany turns to him, eyebrows raised. "Not everything is a joke."

Of course, being called an idiot by Finn is a joke of itself, but Brittany just replies flatly, "Funny things are."

In the corner of her eye, Brittany thinks she sees Santana smile.

"You're putting everyone on this ship in danger," Finn says, like Santana's not even in the room. "I don't think that's funny." It takes him a full second to add, "No offense," to Santana.

Santana rolls her eyes and sighs, "Don't worry about me, Cap. I wouldn't be here if I couldn't handle disrespect, or… pointy things."

Brittany turns fully to Santana—who is far easier on the eyes than Finn, to be sure—and gestures with her screwdriver. "You're tiptoeing. You're hiding. You oughta strut." She offers a smile and a wink and coaxes, kindly, "Show everybody the awesomeness that you are."

"From what I understand," Finn interrupts, "the awesomeness that she is smashed half of New York into rubble."

Venomously, Brittany turns and says icily, "And from what I understand, you were five different flavors of popsicle when that happened. So how about we stick to what we know?"

"As long as  _you_ stick to the problem at hand," Finn shouts, jabbing a stubby finger at the scepter.

Brittany squares her stance. "You think I'm not?"

When Finn just stares at her with his nostrils flared and his arms crossed, Brittany scoffs. "Why'd Holly call us in on this? Why now? What isn't she telling us?" She taps the screwdriver against her fingers. "I can't do the math without all the measures."

Slowly, her words sink through the wax caked in Finn's ears. "You think Holly's hiding something?" he asks with childish innocence.

"She's a  _spy_ , Captain Crunch," Brittany says, a little surprised at his surprise. "She's  _the_ spy."

Finn frowns under the effort of thinking so hard. Brittany glances at Santana and smiles a little. "It's bugging you, too," she says, tapping Santana's hand to make her look up.

Santana startles. "I—uh—"

"Isn't it?" Brittany shimmies onto the table.

"I—" Santana struggles, waving at her monitor and notebook. "Listen, I just wanna do my work, and—"

"Doctor?" Finn prompts darkly.

Santana sends an  _S.O.S._ look in Brittany's direction. Brittany nods gently, encouragingly, and Santana takes a breath and stares hard at her lap. After a moment, she tugs her glasses off. "'A warm light for mankind to share,'" she quotes. "Blaine's jab at Holliday." Santana's tongue flicks over her lip and looks at Brittany. "I think that was meant for you."

The energy project. Pierce Tower. Brittany laces her fingers together and tilts her head, waiting for more.

"Even if you haven't been working with SHIELD recently, Pierce Tower has been all over the news for—months and months," Santana elaborates hesitantly.

"Pierce Tower?" asks Finn. His dull eyes grow duller. "That hideous"—he notices Brittany aiming her rage in his direction and redirects—"that  _building_ downtown?"

"Yeah," Santana cuts in before Brittany can give Finn a piece of her mind or a taste of her fist. "It's run on a large-scale ARC reactor. It'll run itself for—what, a year?" Santana verifies.

Brittany blinks and a smile spreads over her face. Only scientists read the journals that covered the ARC reactor, and though Santana is a scientist, Brittany finds her stomach fluttering at the thought of Santana reading about it, wherever she was.

"And it's just a prototype," Brittany says, glancing at Finn. He's apparently too dense to be suitably impressed, so she emphasizes, "I'm basically the squeaky-cleanest in clean energy right now."

"Sooo," Santana says, "why didn't they bring her in on the Tesseract project? What's SHIELD doing in energy anyway?"

It's a good point. A really good point. Brittany watches Santana nervously glance back and forth; Brittany's gaze drops to Santana's mouth, as if drawn by magnets. She sees Santana's throat shiver as she swallows.

Brittany hops off the table and tugs her shirt so  _Iron Maiden_ is centered over her chest. "I'll be sure to ask TUBBS the exact same question, once my decryption program finishes sneaking into SHIELD's secure files."

Santana's jaw drops. "I'm s-sorry—what?"

"TUBBS?" says Finn.

"That's right," Brittany says brightly, tugging her phone out of her pocket and holding it in front of Finn's face. "It's been running since I hit the bridge. Pretty soon, we'll have every dirty secret SHIELD does."

Brittany grins at Santana because Finn looks constipated again; she grins wider when she sees Santana blushing again.

"And you want them to trust you," scoffs Finn, as usual zeroing in on not-the-point.

"They're an intelligence agency, and they're afraid of intelligence?" Brittany says, incredulous. "Historically, not awesome."

Finn's stuck off-topic. "This is classic divide-and-conquer. Blaine wants to weaken us and if we don't stay focused, it'll work."

"Blaine doesn't know about any of this," Santana says uncertainly, like she's afraid she's missed something. "How could he be—"

"We have our orders." Finn glares at Brittany. "We should follow them."

With a conspiratorial glance at Santana, Brittany pockets her phone and quips, "Following's not really my style."

"And you're all about style," Finn mocks, looking her up and down.

"You're the one wearing an American flag in a research laboratory. Which, might I add, you have no place in."

"Finn." He looks at Santana begrudgingly. Gently, she asks, "Really, honestly, none of this smells fishy to you?"

He hesitates. With a grimace, he says, "Just find the cube," and stomps out of the room.

* * *

Brittany takes a few deep breaths to purge her growing hatred for Finn, then crosses back to Santana's monitor. "That's the guy my dad was obsessed with? He had vintage trading cards and everything." Brittany glances at the door. "I think he made a better popsicle."

"He fought Blaine," Santana says, almost like a question.

Brittany rolls her eyes. "So did I. That guy has drunk about six gallons of the Kool-Aid, and I think he's about to wet himself."

It makes Santana laugh; that makes Brittany smile. "Gross," says Santana.

Their faces stay close. "People aren't meant to be sheep," Brittany says. "Sooner or later, he's gonna follow orders right off a cliff. I just hope I get to be there." She smiles a little, in case Santana worries Brittany really means to kill Finn.

Santana turns back to the table and smiles. "Yeah, well. I'm sure I'll read about it when it happens."

"Or," Brittany drawls, "you'll be suiting up with the rest of us."

Immediately, Santana withdraws and bites her lips. She touches the screen without purpose. "See, that's the thing, I don't—get a suit of armor." Santana breathes deep. "I'm exposed, like a nerve. It's… a nightmare."

Santana stays still for a long moment, her eyes closed and her breaths shallow, focusing on something inside her. When she finally opens her eyes, Brittany sits away from her slightly, to give her space. "You know"—Brittany hesitates—"that chunk of shrapnel is still trying to cut into my right ventricle. It tries every day." She taps the mini reactor and murmurs, "This stops it. It's part of me now. Not just armor."

Santana looks down and away. "But you can control it," she says quietly. The way the words waver makes Brittany wonder if she's ever talked about this with anyone.

"Because I learned how," Brittany pushes, trying for optimism and an implicit offer to help.

"Not the same, not the same," Santana says instantly. She laughs sadly and touches the screen. Brittany brushes her hands away gently so Santana will look at her. Finally, after a long stare, Santana whispers, "The shrapnel wants in. The—she— _it_ wants  _out_."

Santana gazes through the glass at her hands. Brittany watches her, both of them barely moving, and tries to imagine something inside her trying to crawl out. It's not as difficult as it might be.

Finally, Brittany gulps for courage and tries, "I read about your accident. That much gamma radiation… It really should've killed you."

Santana sputters, disbelieving and sad and discouraged. "Are you saying it— _Snix_ saved my life? Or are you just saying I should've died?"

The last question comes out a breathy whisper; Brittany feels her heart stutter and her face blank out at the idea. Brittany reaches out—as if possessed—and tucks Santana's long bangs behind her ear. "I don't really know… but maybe that's the way the universe balanced it out. To keep you alive."

"My life for my control over it?" Santana chokes, looking away.

Brittany touches the edge of Santana's ear and wills herself to say what she means. "To return good to the world, it had to return a little evil, too."

Santana looks at her with wet eyes, her hurt turning slowly into uncertainty. "You don't know I'm good."

"Yes, I do," Brittany breathes, feeling it more than thinking it. She takes in Santana's caved-in expression, her hope and her fear of hope, and feels Santana's fragile pulse under her fingertip.

"You said she's part of me, though. So I'm evil, too," Santana whispers hoarsely, begging to be convinced otherwise.

"Nobody's just good or just evil," Brittany swears. "We're all just people."

"Some of us are more than 'just people,'" Santana whispers, searching back and forth between Brittany's eyes. It's so clear which of them she means; it makes Brittany's heart hurt.

Words aren't working. It's like her childhood—her mother complaining about how hard it is to understand what she says—so Brittany really, really says what she means and presses her lips against Santana's, carefully and completely.

Santana stiffens and trembles, and she just barely touches Brittany's collarbone when she remembers herself and draws back. Brittany breaks away and breathes, "You're more than 'just people' too, Santana. You're more than Snix."

The trembling takes over, and Santana looks at her with uncomprehending worry, as if Brittany will disappear any second. "You don't know anything about me," Santana protests meekly.

Brittany melts. She clicks her tongue sadly and whispers, "You don't know anything about you, either."

* * *

Again, they get interrupted, when Holly ruins Brittany's punchline with her obvious annoyance.

"What the hell are you doing?" Holly demands. Brittany hops off the counter and Holly points right at her. "Yes, you."

Santana shrinks at Holly's tone and Holly adds, "You're supposed to be looking for the Tesseract, not braiding each other's hair."

"We are," Santana insists in apology. "We logged the search algorithm and the server is sweeping for the Tesseract now."

"We'll get a hit within half a mile, thanks to your exceedingly efficient Big Brother technology," Brittany cuts in, stepping up to Holly. "George Orwell would be proud—or, should I say appalled"—she skirts Holly and tilts a monitor toward her—"Although, speaking of appalled, exactly what is Phase Two?"

Holly raises her brows, unsurprised that Brittany's getting up to mischief as usual. "And how do you know about—"

"Weapons?" bellows Finn as he dumps a HYDRA weapon on the metal work counter. He sneers at Brittany. "Sorry, computer was a little slow." He turns back to Holly and shouts, "You're using the Tesseract to build weapons? Did SHIELD used to be spelled H-Y-D-R-A?"

Annoyed, Holly explains, "HYDRA had the Tesseract before, so we gathered everything we could to—"

Brittany taps an image of missile schematics on the screen. "Sorry to interrupt," Brittany interrupts to give them a taste of their own medicine, "but your lies are a little outgunned at the moment."

Sam and Fabray join the party and chatter with Finn and Holly. Brittany overpowers them when she shouts, "Did you two know about this?"

Fabray blatantly ignores her—she's such a bitch sometimes—and glares pointedly at Santana. "You wanna think about removing yourself from this situation?"

Affronted, Santana seems to react on instinct. "I gave that a shot, but you thought Calcutta was too  _far_ removed. You're the one that brought me here!"

"Blaine's manipulating you," Fabray says, stepping toward her like a ranger getting ready to trap a wild animal.

Santana scoffs indignantly. "I haven't set foot in the same room—I haven't shared  _air_ with the guy," she splutters. "The only people manipulating me are in this room."

That stops Fabray in her tracks, her quasi-honor getting the better of her. "You didn't come here because I bat my eyelashes at you," she says, more accusatory than anything else.

"Your eyelashes aren't gonna kick me out of my lab, either," snaps Santana. To Holly, she pushes, "I'd like to know why SHIELD's making weapons that make Hiroshima look like a misfired flare gun."

Holly sighs her long-suffering martyr sigh and points at Sam. "Because of him."

Sam and Finn both do double-takes. "Me? What?" asks Sam nervously.

"Your brotherly spat leveled a small town," Holly reminds him. "Not only are we not alone in this universe; we're also sitting pretty at the bottom of the totem pole."

"Asgard has no fight with your people." Sam glances around the room, clearly wondering if he's surrounded by enemies.

"What if it did?" snaps Holly impatiently. "And there's plenty of other worlds out there itching to take a bite out of us. I notice Blaine didn't have any trouble getting his hands on a bloodthirsty army-for-hire. We needed to send a signal."

"Wielding the Tesseract certainly sends a signal," Sam says incredulously. "A violent signal! It signals to others that Earth is prepared for a conflict on that level."

Holly crosses her arms. "We need to appear formidable until we become formidable. We needed—"

"A nuclear deterrent?" says Brittany drily. "Holly, can you think of anything  _less_ likely to prevent interplanetary war?"

Holly shoots a withering glare her way. "You got a better idea, Pierce?"

"If we don't know what they're packing, how do we know it'll even deter them?" asks Santana, gripping the table edge tightly. "We could still be hilariously underprepared, but this way they know the best we've got before they show us their cards."

Finn makes a noise. "Good grief, stop mixing metaphors. This isn't helping us find the Tesseract or stop Blaine."

"Lay off her," Brittany spits. "You're the one so eager to follow, you'd trail SHIELD into the mouth of a gun."

Fabray says, loud and authoritative, "You're all so naïve. SHIELD monitors potential threats. Without structure and order, all you get is chaos—"

Santana touches her temple with a pained expression. "What do you think  _this_ is? You think we're a team? A club?"

Her eyes are wild. Brittany steps toward her.

"No, no"—she glares at Brittany, then Fabray—"we're a chemical mixture that makes chaos. We're—we're a time bomb."

"You need to cool it," warns Fabray.

"She's got a point," Brittany says, keeping a watchful eye on Santana. "Would it kill you to let her talk for five seconds?"

Finn sneers. "It just might. You know she's a danger to all of us, so back off."

Brittany turns toward him, livid. "Oh, I'm starting to want you to make me," she says darkly, her fists tightening.

"Yeah," snorts Finn, "puttin' the big-girl panties on in the suit of armor. Take that off, what are you?"

"A genius? A billionaire?" Brittany bites.

"I know guys with none of that worth ten of you," Finn dismisses.

Brittany raises an eyebrow, wishing he'd take a swing already. "Just because you count women as one-tenth of a person—"

"You always gotta make this about you," Finn interrupts, throwing his hands up. "You're no saint. You look out for Number One. You're not the guy to lay down on the wire and let the other guy crawl over you."

Brittany feels the anger rushing through her—or maybe it's adrenaline. "I'd just cut the wire," she spits. "Not all of us have been genetically altered to _survive_ a grenade blast to the face."

Weirdly, Finn turns away to glare at Santana. "Whatever," he mutters, "but if you're not gonna step aside, you can at least stop playing the hero."

"Hero? Like what? Like you?" Brittany laughs bitterly, ever surprised at how ridiculous Finn gets. "News flash, Hudson: You're a laboratory experiment. Everything special about you came out of a  _bottle_."

Finn smiles cruelly. "Put on the suit. Let's go a few rounds."

Suddenly, Sam breaks the spell and chuckles. "You're being ridiculous. Stop being so petty."

As if stepping from a fog, Brittany steps back a pace, glancing around. Holly sighs and says, "Agent Fabray, would you please escort Dr. Lopez to her—"

"To my what?" snaps Santana. "To my cell? You already rented it out."

Holly's expression flickers uneasily. "That was just—"

"—in case you needed to kill me," Santana finishes. Her eyes glitter with tears.

"Well—"

"Well you  _can't_ ," Santana spits. "I tried." She looks around wildly, at each of them, her expression angry and dark. "I got upset," she admits as her voice climbs higher, "I didn't see a way out, so I put a bullet in my mouth and the other girl  _spit it out_."

Santana shudders visibly and glares at everyone. "So I put it behind me," she struggles after a long pause, "I tried to focus on—on helping people, and I was good, I was actually living a sort of life, and then you drag me back into this freak show and put everyone on this ship at risk. I didn't want to come in the first place, remember?" she adds at the end, grabbing her stomach with one hand and the scepter with the other.

Holly says, "Dr. Lopez."

Santana's wild eyes snap to her. "What?"

"Put down the scepter," says Finn behind Holly, sounding nervous for the first time.

Santana looks confused and surprised to find it in her hand. Just as she sees it, the tracking program beeps triumphantly. Santana puts the scepter back on the table and hustles over to the monitor. "Sorry, kids, looks like you don't get to see my party trick after all."

Sam says some shit about the Tesseract belonging on Asgard, but Brittany ignores everyone and announces, "I'm going after it."

"You're not going alone," yells Finn as she turns to get her suit. He grabs her arm.

"I'm going wherever I damn well please," Brittany spits at him, yanking her arm from his clammy hands.

"Put on the suit," he threatens, getting in her face. "Let's find out."

Brittany sneers. "I'm not afraid of you, old man."

"Put on the suit."

Behind them, Santana murmurs, "Oh my god," and then the bomb goes off.

* * *

Brittany squints in the smoky air and laments finding Finn right in front of her face. He looks panicked, appropriately so, and he jostles Brittany to her feet and says, "Put on the suit," scared and urgent.

"Yeah," Brittany says, sprinting into the hallway to her quarters.

She jabs her earpiece in as she jogs, and she's activating the suit storage when Schuester checks in with Holly to report Engine 3 as completely offline, but mostly intact. "Someone has to get out there and repair it," Schuester sighs with his usual sluggishness.

"Pierce, do you copy?" asks Holly, sharp and alert in Brittany's earpiece.

"I'm on it," Brittany says with her thumb on the mic button as she snaps the suit into place on her body.

On the channel, Fabray's voice warbles, "We're okay," before she cuts out.

"Fabray, are you with Lopez?" Brittany asks, tapping the mic twice when there's no response. "Fabray, do you copy?"

"She's offline," says Schuester from the bridge.

Brittany closes the mask and makes for the engine bay, cursing under her breath.

She's floating between problem areas—which pretty much means the whole area with electrical arrays and relay boxes, because that's where the bomb took a bite out of the hull and everything inside it—when she hears Finn yell, "Pierce, I'm here!"

"Good," she says, a little surprised he's chosen to make himself useful. "Let's see what they've got."

The suit gives her a visual overlay of the schematic; the cooling system's offline, so that comes first. She only realizes she's murmuring to herself when Finn bellows, "What?"

"Get to that panel over there," she instructs, pointing for him. "Tell me which relays are overloaded." She digs into the guts of the system and goes in, asking Finn over the comm link, "What's it look like inside?"

He drags out his martyr sigh and says, "It appears to run on some form of electricity."

"You're not wrong," Brittany says, grimly amused. At least this time, it makes sense for Finn to be missing major pieces of information. "Describe what you see, as precisely as you can."

Another voice cuts in. Phil. "Sam's got Lopez on the hangar deck," he updates in a rush, then cuts off.

"Great," Brittany and Finn both mutter, for different reasons. Brittany takes a deep breath and overlooks it in favor of guiding him through the relay repair.

She's made it to the rotors by the time he's finished. "Everything's set," he grunts.

"Great," she says, surveying the situation. "Even if I clear the rotors, I'm gonna have to jump it to get it turning again."

"Doesn't it spin awful fast?" asks Finn, dumb but at least concerned by the prospect of the rotors shredding her to pieces.

"There's an override switch that'll reverse the polarity, enough that I can slip out and we can reset it," Brittany thinks aloud.

Blankly, Finn says, "Huh?"

"The red lever. Get to it and pull it when I say."

"Can do."

Brittany rolls her eyes, a little less bitterly, and sets to clearing the debris. It's easy enough, with the laser and repulsors on her side. The battered spoke falls into the clouds. Suddenly, the whole craft slants toward her. "Pierce, we're losing altitude," says Holly over the link shortly after.

"Yup, noticed," Brittany grunts in reply, setting her palms against the rotor and firing the thrusters. Slowly, she gets the fan spinning; then it picks up speed, almost dramatically. "The lever, Captain," she calls.

"Need a minute," Finn says back.

Brittany frowns and squints, worried and fearful. "Lever, now," she nags, watching the rotor slip to her fingertips. All too quickly, she's flat against the wing behind the one she pushed—she just has time to curse again, loud—and she snaps under the rotors.

The suit takes the brunt of the pain, but Brittany's not made of iron, and she's being scuttled around under the rotors and against the fan's casing like a slice of banana just under the blender teeth. "Lever!" she hollers, turning into a shriek, when suddenly Finn must throw it and the fan slows enough for her to slip off.

The thrusters catch and sputter when she fires them, but they hold, and she doesn't plummet to her death. The screens swim ominously in her periphery. She shoots over to the lever—sure enough, there's a pack of infiltrators beating on Finn—and smacks them down like bowling pins.

She makes it into the interior with Finn when it comes over their earpieces: "Agent Coulson is down," Holly announces, her voice dry.

* * *

"These were in Phil Coulson's jacket," Holly says tiredly. She flicks a dozen bloodstained trading cards onto the table and says, "Guess he never got you to sign them."

Finn flinches. He looks at the cards without touching them. Brittany bets this set is as good as her dad's, and wonders if Finn's really worth this much fuss.

Holly clears her throat and speaks with the careful reverence of a eulogy, although she doesn't say more about Phil. "We're flying blind," she admits. "Communications are down on a wide scale; we've lost Sam, Lopez, the Tesseract… You're pretty much what's left."

Finn reaches hesitantly toward the cards, then changes his mind and pulls his hand back. Holly watches him like a hawk.

"Yeah, we were gonna build an arsenal with the Tesseract," she says bluntly. "So what? None of that matters now. And, anyway, I wasn't really betting on that." Holly pauses and glances at each of them, almost encouraging. "I was betting on you. Betting you'd work together when we needed you; when no one else could do the job. Phil Coulson died believing in that idea." She pauses again, dramatically. "In heroes."

Brittany leaves. Holly's no hero; neither is she. That was never the reason she came.

* * *

Finn finds her staring at the emptiness where Snix's cage hung before it dropped Sam to Earth. "Was he married?" asks Finn, clearly talking about Coulson, though he's not the first thing on Brittany's mind.

"No," she says, trying to retract her glazed stare. "There was—a cellist, I think."

Finn leaves a respectful pause. "He was a good man."

"Who should never have gone up against Blaine solo."

Finn bristles. "Now hang on—"

"He should have waited," Brittany insists. "Blaine dropped Sam anyway; he should've—"

"Is this the first time you've lost a soldier?" asks Finn, almost amused by Brittany's angry grief.

"We are not soldiers!" she spits at him. When he stares at her, frowning slightly, she presses on. "I don't—I don't know what we are, but we're not soldiers," she warns.

Finn shakes his head with an expression like he's seen an angel. "No, no we're not, we're superstars," he says.

"Now who's obsessed with style," Brittany mutters, surprised at him.

"We're big-name freakazoids, the lot of us," Finn says. "He wanted to be here; he wanted to be here because we were here."

Brittany frowns, afraid he's actually had an idea. "Are you saying—we were the point?"

"He grinned the whole time," Finn shrugs.

Brittany turns away thoughtfully. "He didn't just want to beat us, he—he hit us right where we live, and… he wants to be seen doing it. That's what Blaine wants. To show he's better than us. Publicly."

"Yeah, yeah," says Finn, nodding along. "He wants to beat us and get a statue in his honor."

Brittany's eyes widen, pinned strangely to Phil's blood stained on the wall. "Or a tower."

"A what?"

"Son of a bitch."

* * *

Even after patching up the Mark VI, Brittany beats everyone else off the helicarrier. She lights out for New York—literally; she never tires of that phrase, now that it's punny—and makes her way to Pierce Tower.

Sure enough, there's what looks like an enormous CoffeeMate with blue filaments set up on the highest rooftop, with old Dr. Selvig slaving dutifully over it.

"Shut it down, Dr. Selvig," Brittany says through the voice amplifier.

As she says it, TUBBS chirps, "The device is already self-sustaining. I'm afraid it's no use."

"It's too late!" shouts Selvig, staggering toward his creation in wide-eyed awe. "She wants to show us something!" He turns to her, his eyes icy blue. "A new universe."

Brittany twists her lips to the side. "Okay." She blasts two medium repulsor shots at the machine and instantly regrets it: they bounce off a spherical blue shield and wipe both her and Selvig off their feet. Brittany flies back into the air, recovering several yards away above empty space, and Selvig gets knocked out against an air conditioning box.

"It's no use," TUBBS repeats gently. "The shield is pure energy: impenetrable."

Brittany curses, then sighs. "I got that," she murmurs, noticing Blaine on the second level balcony, staring up at her. "Plan B," she mutters to herself, hovering slowly toward the landing pad.

"The Mark VII is not ready to be deployed," TUBBS scolds her.

"What are you, my mother?" Brittany hisses, tiring of his attitude. "Skip the spinning rims. We're on the clock. Just have the cuffs on the table."

She clanks onto the circle and walks off the suit, the machines tugging it gently from her body. As she takes the final strides through the door and out of her boots, Blaine comes round the other way and drawls, "Please, appeal to my humanity."

"You're not a human, first of all," Brittany says, hooking her thumbs in her pockets and wandering toward the bar, "and secondly, I'm actually planning to threaten you."

Blaine smiles thinly. "Should've left your armor on, then, metal maiden."

"Iron Maiden," she corrects him casually. "Anyway, suit's seen a lot of mileage, and you've got the Pretty Princess Glowstick Wand, so." She shrugs as she reaches the bottles. "You want a drink?"

He laughs breathily. "Stalling me won't change anything," he warns, shifting the scepter to his other hand and approaching slowly.

"No, threatening," she corrects with a smile. "No drink? You sure?"

Blaine narrows his eyes at her, trying to figure out her play. "I'm having one," Brittany entreats; Blaine wrinkles his nose, annoyed he can't read her expression, and he turns to pace near the windows.

"The Warblers are coming," he says with an ugly sneer. "You can't stop that, drunk or otherwise."

"Speak for yourself," Brittany says, pouring herself a whiskey-coke in a crystal glass. "I've got a higher tolerance than this."

"You've little to threaten me with." Blaine looks at her, confused and suspicious still.

Brittany shrugs. "There's the Avengers," she says, screwing the cap on the Coca-Cola bottle. When Blaine stares blankly, Brittany rolls her eyes and shrugs again. "Dorky, I know. I didn't pick the name, trust me. But it's a little team, Earth's mightiest heroes, yadda yadda."

"Not that mighty, it seems," Blaine says defensively.

Brittany wags her head thoughtfully. "Rocky first chapter, I'll give you that. But let's do a quick head-count, shall we? Your brother, the demi-god," Brittany begins, watching carefully as Blaine scoffs and turns away. She snatches twin receiver bracelets from the countertop and latches them onto her wrists as she continues: "A legendary super-soldier plucked out of the past; a woman with heart-stopping anger management issues; couple of master assassins—and you," Brittany cuts off before she lists herself, "have managed to piss off every everloving one of them."

"I did that on purpose," Blaine sputters, annoyed.

Brittany shrugs, takes her drink, and steps toward him around the bar. "Yeah, not a great plan. You turned yourself into a big ol' target."

"A target protected by an army," Blaine spits. "The Warblers are coming, and they will swarm this planet like the shadow of death."

"But when the Avengers assemble, you're the one we'll find." Brittany gulps half her drink and smiles cheekily. "Even if you destroy the earth and build yourself a nice throne to sit on, as long as any of us is around, we'll keep coming after you. Either way, there's no version of this that comes out with you on top." She shrugs and downs the rest. "You only win when everyone on this planet is dead, and then there'll be nothing for you to rule."

There's a pause, where Blaine just squirms his lips and grips his scepter unhappily. "They won't have time for me," he finally mutters, stepping toward her and raising the scepter, "because they'll be too busy fighting you."

The tip of the spear taps Brittany's ARC reactor and the blue light shorts out. Blaine frowns and tries again; the tip  _clink_ s against the disc. "This usually works," Blaine admits, sounding confused.

Brittany hums, "Well—there's no shame in that, they have pills you can take—"

"Shut up." Blaine snatches forward and grips her by the throat.

"So touchy," she chokes. Her pulse beats wildly against his thumb, trying to fight past the pressure.

Before her vision begins to blur, Blaine smirks icily at her and chucks her through the plate glass. "TUBBS!" she yells as soon as she hits cold air; she screws her eyes shut against the pain of the wind, almost slow-motion against her face. "Any second now!"

TUBBS says something in her ear—the wind blots it out—but almost immediately after, her suit's gauntlets latch onto the wristlets and sew her carefully into the Mark VII. The boot's sole slides over the bottom of her foot just in time to kick the thrusters and swoop up away from the pavement. "Close one," she mutters.

"Don't grouse," TUBBS scolds her.

Brittany ignores him and flies back up the Tower to glare at a surprised Blaine. "I forgot, you also pissed off a completely awesome guy named Phil." She sends a repulsor blast at Blaine's face and smirks grimly when it knocks him off his feet.

At that moment, the Tesseract sends a blue beacon up into the sky. Brittany looks up and curses quietly when it splits a seam overhead. From the darkness beyond the portal, small alien pods seep out like ants from a pile of sand. They look like flies from this far down; Brittany shifts the suit into weapons-free and kicks the thrusters.

As she approaches, she can better see the strange Warbler vehicles and the ugly red veins crossing their dark blue bodies like piping. All wear what looks like a crest burned into their chests. Brittany lights them up with homing microshells from the shoulders of the Mark VII.

"Good thing we reloaded, I guess," she says to herself, wondering if the VI she was wearing had any ammunition left.

"Right you are," TUBBS agrees.

Even with the shells and individual shots from the palm repulsors, a few Warblers slip past Brittany's watch. "TUBBS, please get me an update on everyone else's lazy asses," she growls. A Warbler almost catches her in the gut and she takes him out with a pang of vengeance. "Fuck! Feel free to say I called them that, too."

"Lazy asses?" asks TUBBS obediently. "Or 'fuck'?"

A Warbler craft snags her. "Fuck! Both!" She wrangles them off and snaps one neck while a palm shot takes care of the other. Another pair of fighters pick up her tail, and she weaves through sharp corners in hopes of losing them against the business end of a skyscraper.

Just then, Fabray's in her ear. "Pierce, we're on your 3 headed northeast."

"Jesus, did you stop for coffee and a Danish?" Brittany snaps. "Swing up Park, I've got some clay birds for you."

For once, they both make good on the deal: Brittany brings a trail of fighters up through the intersection and a SHIELD viper takes them out. "More incoming," Fabray announces.

"Let's keep 'em busy," Brittany says.

And she does: After another trip back to Pierce Tower to lure another pack away from the civilians, Brittany tricks most of them into wiping out against a stone building back on Park and drives the remaining pair back around into one another. Once she's picking her next fight, she frowns and asks, "Fabray, you still there?"

"Still here, on the ground," comes Fabray's voice, garbled by background noise or a shaky finger on the micbutton.

Through the portal comes an enormous eel with an exoskeleton straight out of the video game Brittany beat a month and a half ago. From the shadows of its nubby vertebrae spring two squadrons of Warblers, punching straight through the office windows on either side of the flying monstrosity.

"You seeing this, Pierce?" asks Finn, sounding almost nervous.

"Roger that," Brittany says, pursing her lips and preparing herself to do what she signed up to do when she built this suit in the first place. "It's totally cool," she jokes grimly, "I beat this sucker in Zelda just last month. Where's Lopez? Has she shown up yet?"

"Lopez?" Finn's voice crackles.

"Just keep me posted." Brittany paces the eel, watching its body slither in easy, slow rolls. "TUBBS, find me a soft spot, please."

"Working on it," TUBBS chirps helpfully. Brittany flies closer. With a quick maneuver, she gets around in front of it and sends a second batch of microshells out; the explosions pepper its face like pimples, and it writhes in irritation. It pulls a truly novice U-turn by way of two half-demolished buildings and trails slowly—ominously—after her. "Well, you got its attention," says TUBBS.

"Thought you were finding me a weak spot," Brittany reminds him nervously, kicking on the thrusters and leading the eel farther from the city center.

Finn's voice breaks in again. "Pierce, we got her. Just like you said."

"Great," Brittany says, relieved to have the real heavyweight back on their side. "You tell her to suit up. I'm bringing the party to you." Just as she finishes, she hangs a right and there they are, the four of them visible by Finn's ridiculous outfit and the destruction surrounding them.

Chang sighs. "I don't see how that's a party."

Sure enough, Santana's there beside them. With quick zoom, Brittany can make her out clearly, wearing a faded too-big t-shirt and men's jeans rolled at the cuffs. Brittany smiles, liking the way they hang on her hips, until the eel shrieks behind her.

In the side screen, the zoom shows Santana turning around; Santana breaks into a smile and Brittany smiles back, as if Santana can see. Santana turns back to say something as Brittany gets closer; she turns back and steps toward Brittany and the beast, away from the group. Santana squares her shoulders just before they start to twitch and grow wider.

The nobs of her shoulder joints and collarbone and elbows jut out, almost grotesquely, for an instant before muscles grow up around them like History Channel models of mountains forming. Santana's skin goes green, shade by shade, and Santana's scream reaches Brittany's ears. As Santana's body grows, bulky and lean and tall, tearing through the borrowed clothes, the shriek becomes a low grunt.

It's finished by the last seconds of Brittany's approach: Snix snarls, ready to tango, in a spare dark spandex suit with her fists curled. Brittany zips by and Snix punches the eel square in the nose, her heels plowing a trough in the center of the street as she grinds the eel to a stop so suddenly it tips over the other way. Brittany does an about-face and fires several shots into the eel's guts as its exposed ribs pop off one by one.

They regroup in the center—though Brittany's more worried than anxious, Snix seems too distracted by the chaos to start pummeling her teammates—and two more eels slither out of the portal.

"Alright, until we close the portal, our priority is containment," Captain Underpants informs them. "Chang, I want you on that roof: eyes on everything, call our shots when you see 'em. Pierce, you've got the perimeter. Anything gets more than three blocks out, you turn it back or turn it to toast."

Chang, whose defection apparently wore off, seems just as interested in hearing the rest as Brittany is. "Give me a lift?" he asks before Finn can continue.

"Right," Brittany nods, grabbing him by the quiver. "Better clench up, Legolas."

Brittany's just dumped Chang on the rooftop when he's back in her ear. "Got some strays on your tail, Pierce," he warns.

"Just trying to keep 'em off the streets," Brittany teases, glancing at the portal where Sam's lightning trick has sent another pack of eels packing.

"Well, they can't bank worth a damn," Chang observes helpfully. "Just find a tight corner and let 'em crash."

"Thanks," Brittany says, glad she's not pulling the weight alone. She takes a let into a parking garage and a right on a T and gets rid of the rest. "That about did it. What else you got?"

"Sam's taking out a mess of them down on 6th."

Brittany  _tsk_ s. "And he didn't invite me."

She cuts a swath in a wide loop, taking out fliers and footmen and the pack of Warblers scaling Chang's tower, and hops down to help Finn for a second when she sees a pair creeping up on his back. She passes one of the eels and catches a glimpse of Snix doing a number on the exoskeleton and the squadron of Warblers inhabiting the eel's back like lice. Sam's backing her up, and Brittany turns a corner away from them after a Warbler vehicle just when she sees Snix yank a sharp shard of bone and wedge it into the eel's head.

Over the comm link, Chang says, "Q, what're you doing?"

Fabray answers him: "Little help would be nice."

Brittany's emptying her battery trying to laser through the shell of the last eel when TUBBS sighs. "We will lose power before we penetrate that shell," he tells her regretfully.

Brittany rings around the front and frowns. "Ever heard the story of Jonah and the whale?" she asks.

"No. No. Not a good idea," TUBBS stammers, even as Brittany zooms right at the eel's gaping gullet. It's hot and dark and sticky inside, but the missiles make contact almost immediately and Brittany blows out as soon as she gets midway inside. The beast comes apart and Brittany lands face first on a taxicab.

This is the group on 6th Chang mentioned, but Sam's long since moved on. They encircle her, shooting their blue-powered rifles in turns, and the suit warns her its power is waning. She curses, struggling to get to her feet while a Warbler bats her about the head with its weapon.

She's fallen for the third time when the call comes through from Holly, in the soft, anxious-guilty voice she uses when she feels bad for asking. "Pierce, you've got a nuke coming your way from a rogue bird. Can you stop it?"

"Yeah," she grunts, forcing her body upright and blasting blindly at the Warblers. "TUBBS, put everything left into the thrusters."

"Just did," TUBBS says.

Brittany takes off toward the helicarrier.

* * *

"I can close it," says Fabray over the comm link as Brittany nears the bridge.

Finn shouts, "Do it!"

"No, not yet," Brittany cuts in quickly.

Finn speaks before Brittany can finish. "Pierce, these things are still coming. We have to close it, now!"

"I've got a nuke coming in," Brittany bites. "Less than a minute. There's only one place to put it." No one questions her on that: All too quickly, she spots the missile and lines up underneath it. She grips its fins and eases her thrusters, letting it carry her toward Manhattan and the portal.

"Pierce, you know that's a one-way trip," Finn says, firmness hiding his surprise.

"TUBBS, save the rest for the return trip," she instructs, knowing it's probably fruitless.

TUBBS sounds hesitant. "I—Yes, ma'am."

He never calls her  _ma'am_. Brittany tries not to think about it and works on judging the angle for the portal. She's a block and a half from the Tower when she starts guiding the missile up; it follows a sharp exponential as she guides it up, and a millisecond later, barely a breath later, they're who-knows-where in space and the Earth is safe.

Her suit darkens immediately, all power sucked into pressurizing the inside against the crushing power of space. Brittany can taste how little air there is in her helmet, and her eyelids flutter in slow motion when the nuke hits the Warbler base ship.

She feels herself sinking. Earth's gravity barely reaches her: It touches her with thin fingers, like hair against her face.

Her eyelids feel heavier, like her body, sinking into warm quicksand.

A bright, red-yellow-white-hot light burns in front of her face. It glows red against her shut eyes.

Heavy.

* * *

A howl wakes her, gasping. "What—what the fuck was that?" Brittany pants as she looks around. The others hover around her; Finn crouches beside her; Snix howls again, triumphant, and smacks her fist against her sternum.

"Holy hell," Brittany manages with an uncertain smile. "What just happened?" She glances among their faces and then at Snix's. "Please tell me nobody kissed me," she says, wondering if Santana can hear her from inside.

Instead of answering, Finn looks off in the distance and nods to himself six times, like a bobblehead. "We won," he finally says.

Brittany heaves a heavy sigh. She was starting to worry there were six more eels headed their way, or everyone had turned into zombies, or something crazy awful like that. "Alright, yay," she says weakly, trying to pump her fist and dropping it as soon as she lifts it. The armor feels heavy with her fatigue. "Yay us. Let's—let's just not come in tomorrow, huh?"

She glances up under her brows. Sam cracks a smile at her. "You ever tried shawarma?" she asks Finn. "I saw a shawarma joint like two blocks from here… or there. But I don't know what it is, and I wanna try it."

Sam smiles grimly. "We're not finished yet."

Right: Blaine and the Tesseract are still at large, it seems. Brittany smiles hopefully. "But then shawarma after?"

Sam laughs and walks over to offer her his hand. Brittany expects her muscles to work, but they fail halfway up, and Sam holds her arm until she steadies. "Yes, shawarma after," he says with a chuckle.

Snix snuffles and wipes her nose on her forearm. She seems strangely docile; she grabs a fallen Warbler and flops its leg in the other direction, like a pet bored with its toys.

"Let's go get Blaine, then," Finn suggests rather happily. He touches his ear. "Quinn, Mike, do you copy? Meet us at Pierce Tower to collect the prisoner."

Brittany sticks close to Sam as they walk, though she finds her strength returning. TUBBS is quiet; on battery reserves, the suit's power is only used to keep the suit itself moving, to keep Brittany from getting trapped inside it. Snix trails behind them, though Sam glances back at her warily now and again.

"What's the matter? She hasn't squashed us yet," Brittany finally says, when they're nearing the Tower's entrance and sidestepping the giant  _E_ smashed on the plaza.

Sam looks away and purses his lips. "She punched me again earlier."

Brittany laughs. Sam turns back to her in surprise. "Did she bruise your tender feelings, trouty mouth?" Brittany teases.

"Hardly." Sam puffs up and Brittany just giggles more.

* * *

This time, when Blaine surrenders without a fight, his smile is nervous instead of slimy. Snix barrels forward and socks him one more time, but no one feels obligated to shield him. Schuester shows up in a SHIELD chopper to collect them, but once the SWAT team takes care of Blaine and the Tesseract, Sam declares they're staying behind.

Schuester looks confused, so Sam explains, "We have promised the woman of iron to sample something called shawarma. We will return to SHIELD when this mission is completed."

As usual, Sam sounds ridiculous, but once he's gotten rid of Schuester and the rest, he turns to Brittany with an amused glint in his eye. Brittany grins at him and they head back to the streets.

Rescue efforts have begun, with ambulances and EMTs and Red Cross. They're a few blocks from the Tower, and the ragtag Avengers—now reunited with Fabray and Chang, who keep exchanging these sappy little smiles with what they probably imagine is subtlety—pick their way among the crushed cars and downed Warblers.

"Hey, the Tower looks a little better now," Finn says smugly, looking up at where most of the letters in  _Pierce_ have fallen down.

Brittany curls her lip in a hostile smile, but before she can say anything, Snix socks Finn right across the cheek. Finn gapes—half because his jaw is crooked, half from shock—and Brittany snickers.

For once, Finn knows better than to say anything—though Brittany may be giving him credit over his wounded mouth. Snix lumbers ahead of the pack and stops a few yards from a group of very startled civilians and rescue workers. Snix bares her teeth at them, huffs, and flops unceremoniously onto the hood of a battered yellow taxi. The metal caves easily under her weight, and she yawns and curls up into the nest she's made for herself. She punches the inside of the crater under her head, presumably to make it more comfortable, and settles in to fall asleep.

Brittany and Sam glance at each other, as do Fabray and Chang. Finn just cradles his jaw and whines inarticulately.

* * *

The rescue workers shy away from them, apparently assuming they're qualified to handle their own wounds. Sam passes supplies to the others from inside an ambulance and Fabray and Chang take a look at Finn's jaw.

Snix has shifted back into Santana in sleep. Brittany makes a five minute trip into a destroyed GAP and grabs a pair of sneakers and a t-shirt in what she's 90% sure is Santana's size, then grins and grabs men's jeans because she liked the way they looked and she's doing Santana a favor, anyway.

When she gets back, Santana's still sleeping soundly, though she seems a little cold in what little she's wearing. The bra and shorts must be engineered somehow to follow her size changes, because they still cling tight to her skin; they don't protect the rest of her, though. Brittany can see the muscles in her side quiver when a breeze kicks up.

Brittany's pretending not to stare at Santana's abs and wondering if she should grab a blanket from the ambulance when Santana stirs.

"Hey," Brittany says gently, unable to keep from grinning. They saved the world and Santana's awake: No better combination exists.

Santana squints. "Wh… what…" She touches the metal crater to push herself up, but winces and freezes instead. She touches her forehead and hisses quietly.

"I was wondering how long you'd take to come around," Brittany says conversationally, adjusting her helmet under her arm. Santana looks behind Brittany, around to the sides, and at the car hood she sits in. Her eyes are still glazed.

A siren sounds a block away. Santana stares into space and touches her heart gingerly.

"I brought you some clothes," Brittany offers, holding them out.

Santana looks down at herself suddenly, apparently realizing what little she's wearing, and blushes. It's more obvious now, across the paler skin usually protected by cloth, and Brittany bites her lips to hide her smile when Santana snatches the pile with embarrassed eagerness. "Thanks," Santana mutters, her voice that delicious deep rasp that sends shivers down Brittany's spine. Santana yanks the jeans up her legs—the blue a nice contrast with her skin—and does up the fly and button with her tongue between her teeth.

Santana spreads the t-shirt across her knees and clears her throat. "Where'd you get these?" Santana asks.

She sounds nervous. Brittany glances at her eyes—sees how they shift back and forth and flicker across Brittany's face and eyes and lips—and fibs, "I made Finn grab 'em from some store on our way up the street."

Santana blinks. "You stole them?" she asks, pulling the shirt on hurriedly.

Only Santana would worry about that in the chaos that surrounds them. "Look around," Brittany says gently. "You think somebody's gonna miss them?"

Santana glances around and mumbles, "Guess not." She catches sight of the socks and looks up right when Brittany hands her the shoes she grabbed. Santana simpers, wipes the dirt off her feet, and pulls the socks on. "So… I guess we did it?" Santana asks.

"Absofruitly," Brittany says. She smiles; the shoes look to fit correctly. Santana smiles back, timidly, and Brittany reaches out to tuck Santana's hair out of the way. "We all did it," Brittany reminds her.

"Anything you wanna bring me up to speed on?" Santana asks, her voice still gruff, her tone nervous to hear what she's done. It's more sad than funny, since Snix basically saved the day and Santana's ready to beg forgiveness.

To drive the point home, Brittany traces Santana's ear and tells her what the others said. "You saved my life."

Santana's wide-eyed. "She did?"

Brittany's face falls. "No," she breathes, touching Santana's jaw, " _you_ did."

It's still not quite enough—words never are—and Brittany's about to tell her again, with her mouth but without the space between them, when Sam calls out.

"Come on, let us find food," he bellows.

Brittany smiles at Santana, a promise for later, and takes in Santana's shy smile. She touches Santana's cheek once more and turns to Sam. "You better mean shawarma," she reminds him, "'cause I was serious."

"Shawarma?" Santana repeats. She clambers off the car and touches Brittany's elbow.

Brittany grins and grabs Santana's hand. "Yeah. I saw a food joint with a sign in the window. I dunno what it is, but I wanna try it."

Fabray sighs. "We have more pressing matters," she drawls, nodding at Finn where he clutches his face with both hands. "Finn busted his jaw. We need a real medic."

Brittany manages not to roll her eyes, but she's not about to offer, even if Finn proved useful and less of an ass when the planet's fate is at stake.

Luckily, Chang steps in with a sigh. "I'll go grab one." He jogs around the ambulance to the clot of medics and civilians.

Brittany feels Santana squeeze their fingers together. Brittany turns happily and sees Santana pout impatiently, hidden behind Brittany's shoulder from Finn's sullen eyes.

Brittany grins at her, so adorably shy and grumpy and hesitant and happy all in one expression, and squeezes back.

Then, Santana's stomach grumbles loud enough for Brittany to hear. Santana blushes hard and Brittany wrinkles her nose at her with a wide, dopey grin.

* * *

Sam finds the manager doing damage control, and though they only ask where the kitchen is and what the recipe is, the manager insists they sit and gets the two waiters helping him clean up to help him make the Avengers a meal.

They're deciding how to sit when Santana whispers to Brittany, "Sit on my right. I'm a leftie."

Sam overhears. "Fate!" he proclaims, grinning widely at Brittany. Brittany grins back; she's not surprised he's picked up what's going on. When they sit, Brittany lets her left hand settle on Santana's knee, and Santana blushes and tries to hide it.

Once the manager hands out their food, babbling excitedly about their choice to patronize his establishment on the heels of a truly epic battle, Brittany notices Fabray glaring at the table. It's about the spot where Brittany's hand sits underneath, and Brittany grins at the thought of Fabray getting her panties in a wad about the  _gay_ happening right across from her.

When Santana's not looking—she and Fabray seem to have some weird understanding, or at least Santana cares what Fabray thinks of her—Brittany sticks out her tongue and Fabray glares in a different direction.

Finn can't eat with his jaw wired shut. Brittany stuffs her face to keep from grinning too smugly about it.

Without Finn mucking things up, the group gets along pretty well, it seems. The whole experience is only improved by the little squeaks and jumps Santana makes when Brittany squeezes her knee without warning. Fabray keeps shooting them occasional glares, but Chang, sitting next to Brittany, eventually nudges her with his elbow and grins at her.

Then, Sam finishes his drink and smacks his lips loudly. "Another!" he shouts, smashing the cup on the floor. Everyone turns to look at him and Brittany sneaks a peck to Santana's cheek.

"Thanks for socking Finn, by the way," Brittany whispers with a sly smile.

Santana does a spit-take and gasps. "What?"


End file.
